


xest

by starsidespica



Series: metempsychosis [2]
Category: Persona 5, アルノサージュ ~生まれいずる星へ祈る詩~ | Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star
Genre: Abuse & Recovery, Alternate Universe - Ar nosurge Fusion, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Bullying, Cheating, Depression, Dimensional Kidnapping, Exploitation, F/M, Homophobia, M/M, Mild Language, Pining, Self-Esteem Issues, The Author is Still Bad at Tagging, Unrequited Love, food hoarding, not-so-minor cameos from the rest of the ar nosurge cast, references to gambling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-29
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 264,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21604480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starsidespica/pseuds/starsidespica
Summary: Yuuki Mishima struggles with life After Akira. Akira will come back one day, and all he has to do is wait it out. Be patient. That's easier said than done, but Yuuki is determined to pull through. A year or two or ten will be nothing once Akira is back, and then he'll be happy.Now, if only his friends can say the same.
Relationships: Amamiya Ren/Mishima Yuuki, Kitagawa Yusuke/Mishima Yuuki (unrequited), Kurusu Akira/Mishima Yuuki, Mishima Yuuki/Persona 5 Protagonist, Sakamoto Ryuji/Takamaki Ann
Series: metempsychosis [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1441789
Comments: 42
Kudos: 31





	1. The First Day

**Author's Note:**

> xest: Hymmnos, verb; to convert

Akira Kurusu wasn’t sure how long it took for the robot to move. It would jerk in fits and starts—connections being made and then lost as one person after another glanced at his house and shut off their phones or laptops or whatever they were using—and then die again, and he’d be left waiting for the next person to show up.

The air was suffocating him. He was ready to _leave_ —but no one was willing to help him. No one was willing to even listen to what he had to say, and he was too afraid of missing the next person to even step out of his house to visit Morgana for food, or to take a nap, or even to sit and read.

Instead, he paced. Back and forth in his tiny house, the tremendous humming coming from the attic drowning out his steps. He paced until he was dizzy, sat down to stare at a wall willing the headache to go away, and then paced some more once the lightheadedness was past. He squeezed his rings, their edges cutting into his fingers.

He’d forgotten what waiting was like—or maybe it was just how eager he was to get home to Earth and his parents and Yuuki, whose voice was already beginning to sound like something from a dream.

Akira didn’t want to leave things like that. He’d wanted a happier goodbye—and instead Yuuki had tossed threats his way. _“I’ll find someone who will come back to me,”_ he’d said, and Akira wished with every fiber of his mental-being that Yuuki wouldn’t do such a thing, not before they even had a chance to meet in person.

And Yuuki didn’t know how lonely it was here in Akira’s dream. There was no one but Morgana, and the cat-boy didn’t want to talk to him again, which meant there was no one but Akira and a robot that no one wanted to move.

Was he being too boring, pacing around? What would he have to do to get someone to stay?

His sleeve caught the handle of the frying pan left on the stove; with a clatter it fell to the floor, the noise ringing in Akira’s ears—but it didn’t hurt or make him wince with its suddenness, the way he remembered it doing. Just another effect of the dream, he supposed, and kicked it out of the way. He watched it spin off into a corner and sucked in a breath when his foot didn’t even hurt.

“I need to be better than this,” he told himself, as he’d gotten used to. “Yuuki’s counting on me. Ra Ciela is counting on me. I can’t lose it here.”

But what could he do, except wait? What could he do, aside from pace to alleviate the nerves turning him into a live wire?

If Yuuki were still here, Akira could talk to him until he settled down. Yuuki didn’t mind when he babbled for too long; Yuuki didn’t mind just sitting there as they both did nothing at all, the ease of each other’s company doing more than any medicine ever would.

He wished they had more time to talk properly. He wished he hadn’t gone on and on about kisses and how much Yuuki meant to him; how was Akira supposed to find him after all of this, if he knew nothing about the boy on the other side of the monitor?

Yuuki had said he might not wait. Akira couldn’t be standing here, thumb against his pair of rings, wishing for the goddamned robot to just _move_ , already—

He sighed again. He’d gotten too used to Yuuki’s visits, to his steady presence in the corner of the room. The monitor’s pedestal sat empty, the connector port like a sliced-open throat, and Akira forced himself to breathe.

In, one, two, three. Out, one, two, three. Some book he’d read at some point had said it was best to count to ten, but he thought if he did that he’d fall asleep on his feet.

Maybe a nap was what he needed. How long had it been since he’d slept? How many days had gone by since Yuuki had made him go through with it? How many nights?

But he had to stay awake. He couldn’t miss someone else connecting to the robot; the thing could move. They could just walk off with it, and where was Akira supposed to find the materials for another Ar nosurge tube?

But, he wanted—not the nap, but the dreams within this dream world. Ones where his brain would paint up a face to go with the voice Akira was forgetting already; ones where they were happy, or sad, or angry, instead of being apart and wishing for each other.

The bed was too comfortable, too full of memories. How many times had he laid down with the monitor on its side and told a story? How many times had he talked until he fell asleep? How many times had he wished that Yuuki was really beside him, bringing the heat and warmth of another body close to his?

Akira snatched up his blankets, repositioned the armchair so that it faced the robot, and tried to settle in for a nap—but minutes or hours went by, his nerves going into overdrive at every little creak and groan of the house as it settled and every thump up in the attic, and jolting him awake at the implications.

He’d slept that first time, when the monitor was just a lifeless thing Morgana had told him to build to wile away the hours. He hadn’t cared about what it would do because he hadn’t known what it would do—that it would lead him to someone he never wanted to part with, that it would lead him to his lost self, that it would lead him to answers and questions and expectations aplenty.

But now, he couldn’t. He wasn’t the naive Ionasal anymore, with nothing to him except the clothes on his back and his name. He wasn’t even Ren anymore, scared out of his mind for his life and wishing that everything—even this dream where he’d met Yuuki—was just a bad dream he would wake up from, safe and sound in his bedroom on Earth.

He wasn’t even Akira. Not completely—not the way Yuuki thought him to be. It had been easy to affect Ionasal’s Emperor stature for a little while—terrifyingly easy—and he could still feel it, a simple pull away in his mind. Ren, too, was there, waiting to burst into tears at being cast off again.

It felt like there were so many parts to himself that he would never get them all straight, that he would never fit together again as a whole person. How could Yuuki love someone like him?

… He was doubting himself again. Yuuki had called him brave and strong; he only had to keep going, keep believing that someone else out in the universe—in the multitude of dimensions—would take pity on him and help.

But it was a hard thing to believe, as he drifted, eventually, into a tumultuous sleep.

* * *

Dimensions away, Shinya Oda stood in front of his bedroom mirror, trying to decide whether to leave his gakuran jacket unbuttoned or not. It would be fine closed if it were roomy, like the jacket hanging from the hook on his door, but it was so form-fitting he could feel the hem move whenever he raised his hands.

Ugh. Without stepping a foot in the door, Shinya already hated middle school.

He made do with buttoning the middle ones and leaving the rest undone—no one, he thought, could really complain about it being sloppy—and then tugged a brush through his hair.

That was going to be the problem. He could already hear the complaints from one overly-strict teacher or another, but he looked better with it long. He liked it better long, even if it got in his face most of the time and he wound up chewing on it during meals if he didn’t tie it back.

… Even if it got in the way during a Gun About match and he lost because it got in his eyes.

He stuffed his pocket full of hair ties, grabbed up his new schoolbag, and headed out.

Breakfast was bread from Yon-Germain as he switched lines; the change rattled with every step, and he wondered how much bread the money his mother left him would buy. A week’s worth?

How many games of Gun About would that cost him?

But it wasn’t as if he could starve, either. He’d just have to earn his gaming money the way he did in elementary: by winning it from the idiots at school too stupid enough not to know better than to challenge him. He’d earn plenty that way, unless they all got bored of it after a week and left like the last group did.

Shinya hated it, but he would have to lose some of the time. It was the only way to ensure that they kept coming back.

In the meantime, though, he had a long train ride ahead of him. He wasn’t fortunate enough to snag a seat and had to stand crammed in between a couple of high school girls and a pair of businessmen, all of whom ignored him for their phones.

Oh, right. He had one of those now, didn’t he—a present from his mother on his acceptance to middle school, and a brand new model to boot—so he dug it out of his bag, shoved in some earbuds, and browsed the apps.

Social media sites, e-mail, an address book for the contacts he didn’t have—useless, all of it. He wasn’t about to cut into his weekly allowance using up data, and he definitely didn’t need to check his mail, or the news, or browse through his empty contact list on the train.

Seriously, though: weren’t smartphones supposed to have games and stuff on them? Was he supposed to go looking for them himself, or did this hunk of metal not have a single thing that could keep him from dying of boredom on his very first day of middle school?

Well.

He took a deep, calming breath. It was a brand new phone. He’d thought it wouldn’t have anything on it, but he hadn’t thought to check the night before; it was just something he was going to have to live with until he got back home and could browse.

He could at least amuse himself by listening to ringtones, though.

So, where were they, again? On his old phone—a kid’s model, good for calling his mother or emergency services but not much else—they’d been under settings, right?

And settings, if he remembered right, was an icon shaped like a gear.

Shinya skimmed through all of his apps and clicked the first one of a gear he could find. It was a little off-color than the one on his old phone, but the rest of the apps were all colorful, so he figured it must be, too.

Perfectly sound reasoning, he thought, until he saw a plainer, grayer gear in the bottom corner of the screen with the tag **Settings** on it.

… Then what the hell did he click? And why was it taking so long to start up?

Or, rather, why had it crashed his phone? What kind of shitty malware was this, exactly?

He resisted the urge to curse out loud—he knew adults didn’t like it when he did, and didn’t feel much like getting a lecture for the rest of his train ride about manners and respect and all that other baloney—and took another deep breath. Breathing always helped his mother calm down enough to make her near-incessant phone calls to his old school, and he always thought they’d work for him, too.

(They very rarely did.)

So he breathed in and held it. His earbuds chirped with noise; his phone, probably resetting itself. That was what smartphones were supposed to do, right?

Except when he looked at it, lines of code scrolled by, faster than he could read. His head ached just keeping up with one line at a time until they were gone, replaced with some weird booting screen he definitely didn’t remember from last night.

Something this fancy couldn’t be malware—or at least, not normal malware. What kind of virus advertised itself to you like this? Weren’t they supposed to be hidden and hard to find?

Shinya didn’t know. The only thing he used his computer at home for was looking up local Gun About tournaments and doing his homework; the rest of the time it sat there collecting dust as he went out to the arcade.

Maybe he should look that up later. Maybe the school library had books on it, if he could ever find the desire to actually read one of them.

But, finally—

 **Character** **S** **election** , read the text at the top of the screen.

What.

What the hell kind of virus was this? Was it even a virus at all?

Shinya chewed his lip. On one hand, he could just shut his phone off; that would surely turn off whatever this was, and he could never touch it again, or make up some lie his mother might believe and go and trade it in for a different phone that didn’t have viruses preinstalled.

On the other, it looked like a game. The characters he could choose from were a team of a robot (boring) and some guy that looked like the epitome of an average joe in anime (also boring) to some girl with pink hair all by her lonesome that Shinya scrolled right by because it looked like she was barely wearing anything at all and he could hear the giggles of the high school girls behind him through his earbuds.

There was nothing to indicate what the characters were for and no way out of the selection screen. He didn’t even know what kind of game this was—it could be one of those new fancy mobile card games everyone at school liked, the ones where the gameplay trailers never matched how boring it was to sit there and push cards around but no one cared because the art was pretty or some shit like that—but it was either play it and hope it was good, or reset his phone and listen to train announcements for the rest of the ride.

He glanced at his watch—thirty-five minutes until he reached his stop—and sighed.

In Gun About, the characters you didn’t pick became one of your opponents that barred your way and even showed up in the boss fights to hassle you into wasting more ammo than you needed to. Shinya was used to guys in army gear, their helmets drab and clothing covered in old blood stains—not robots, and definitely not pink-haired girls who looked like they were one layer away from starring in a hentai or a magical girl anime or both. If he was going to have to have enemies on the screen, he didn’t want their garish hair blinding him to everything else.

He picked the pink-haired girl. The train shuddered and slowed to a stop, the car rocking around him as people came and went.

If anyone saw his character twirl and wink at him from the screen, no one commented.

It was probably a good thing, because if he’d heard, Shinya would have strangled them.

He half-listened to a basic summary of what was going on—his character was on a colony ship drifting through space, blah blah blah—and yawned, wondering whether this game was going to be one of those visual novels instead of a card game. He didn’t have the patience for those things; they were pretty pictures and all talk and no action, so boring he wondered how anybody could play something like that.

And then he skipped through some dialogue—boring—and some more dialogue—also boring—and yawned again.

Another stop. Another wave of people knocking him around; the high school girls left, a heavyset businesswoman taking their place, the string of pearls around her neck practically choking her. Shinya swore the skin was purple there—but she caught him staring before he could really tell.

He tuned back into the game to find his character standing around in a hallway, idly flapping her arms like a bird.

The hell. He’d chosen her because he didn’t want to look at her, and now he _had_ to?

But there were fifteen minutes left in his train ride. Maybe if he got into a fight—if the game had fights, or battles, or anything remotely exciting at all—he’d have enough knowledge to restart the game, pick a character that was less of an eyesore, and go from there.

Even he had fumbled at first, when he was just picking up Gun About.

Since there weren’t any controls, Shinya did what he’d seen dozens of other mobile gamers do: he shoved one finger to the screen and kept at it as his character skipped down the hallway, bypassing doors three times as large as she was, her bright pink hair swaying behind her like a cape.

Maybe if he dyed it a different color, it’d be tolerable to look at, and at least he wasn’t staring at his character from the front; her back was covered much more than he remembered the rest of her being, and it would be just his luck for the businesswoman with her heavy purse to notice what, exactly, he was doing on his phone.

As if it was any of her business what he played or who he played as, but he knew from experience that adults—even those high school girls—couldn’t resist the urge to stick their noses into everyone else’s business, as if being an adult made them some kind of authority on everything, ever.

He was tired of lectures. What he wouldn’t give to stand over them all like a true king, see how they liked it—

 _Oh_ , he thought, glancing back down at his phone as the image on the screen rippled and led him to a battle screen, his character wielding massive gauntlets the size of her head in each hand, hair streaming and bouncing behind her.

Of course.

He skimmed through the tutorial, eyeing the pair of fairies on the other side of the battlefield. One push of his thumb and he was targeting one; another, and his character leaped across the screen, gauntlet positioned for a perfect—and rather nasty-looking—uppercut.

Well, it wasn’t Gun About, but at least it wasn’t a card game.

* * *

Yuuki Mishima set his books on the table and sighed.

Futaba Isshiki glanced at the titles and snorted. From where he was slumped over on the table top, the glare on her glasses threw her face into that of a conniving madwoman, even though all she was doing was laughing at him.

“That’s baby stuff, NPC,” she told him, and he groaned.

“Then I guess I’m a baby,” he said, “which means you’ll have pity on me and help me out, right?”

“Nope! You’re a big boy, Nishima, you gotta learn it on your own!”

He groaned again. His rings, strung on a chain about his throat, dug into his collarbone.

Yuuki had come to Leblanc on his very first day of class for the peace and quiet he was sure he wasn’t going to get in his cheap apartment. Yuuki’s father had helped him pick the place out over the last month, as Yuuki tried to tie together the elaborate lie his friends had already started for him into something his father would believe.

Everything he could think of sounded fake—but then again, the truth sounded even worse, and since the app that connected him to a boy in another dimension had disappeared from his phone, he had no way of proving it, either.

(Except for the pictures and videos still in his gallery, but Yuuki knew those would invite more questions than Yuuki could ever possibly answer.)

“I don’t even care about website design,” he mumbled, and Sojiro Sakura, owner of Leblanc and Futaba’s guardian while her mother was off working in America, chuckled as he came up the stairs.

“We can’t all start off with the hard stuff,” he said, setting down plates of curry that made Yuuki’s and Futaba’s mouths water.

Futaba barely uttered a blessing before shoveling as much as she could into her mouth; Yuuki, ever mindful of his place, said, “Thanks, Boss,” and moved his books off to the side to drag his plate closer, the bread he’d eaten for lunch feeling like it was a lifetime ago.

He took his time with the meal, glancing over at his books every so often. Boss came and went with coffee—decaf for Futaba, as per her doctor’s instructions, and one of his cheaper blends for Yuuki, who was determined to pay for his food from now on—then with seconds for Futaba.

Leblanc must have been deserted, because he asked, “You been okay, kid?”

No, Yuuki wanted to say. He was living in a cheap apartment where the walls were practically—and probably—made of rice paper, and his neighbor upstairs had a toddler who liked to stomp her way across the ceiling and back for hours at a time. While the kid was cute, her mother threw him off—she looked familiar in a way he couldn’t describe, as if he’d seen her in passing hundreds of times but never gotten a good look.

Akira would enjoy the story, if Akira were still around.

That was another reason he couldn’t say he was okay: he missed Akira. The hole Yuuki had thought he filled with love and friendship was wide open again and drawing him in, spurred on by sleepless nights courtesy of small children and his own spiraling anxiety and lots of caffeine he shouldn’t be drinking.

(He’d order decaf, too, but he couldn’t quite afford it, like he couldn’t afford to see his therapist anymore.)

Boss must have seen it in his face. “That bad, huh?” he asked.

“I’m still here,” Yuuki said, one hand reaching for his rings.

At that moment, Futaba sputtered and bolted from the table. Boss shook his head as she raced down the stairs and into the little toilet in the cafe, then sighed. “I’ve told her not to eat so fast.”

Yuuki, who had seen more than his fair share of Futaba’s close calls with choking, asked, “Why does she eat so fast?”

“Wakaba isn’t exactly the best cook, and wolfing it down means she can’t taste the burnt parts,” Boss said, then cleared his throat. “But, uh, more importantly—your dad told me you’re pretty good at composition. That true?”

“Yeah.” If his grades were anything to go by, at least. Ms. Kawakami had hounded him right up until he’d walked off Shujin’s property to change his major, too, if that had any merit, either.

“Well, you see, Futaba’s not exactly the best at it. She’s got a photographic memory but struggles, sometimes, to come to conclusions like her peers; at least, that’s what I was told when we went up to the school yesterday for a quick meeting.”

“And I guess she has trouble stating the conclusions she does come to,” Yuuki guessed. Finally, something the genius child was bad at.

“Exactly,” Boss said. “So, I was thinking—and you don’t have to agree—but if you’d tutor her on the weekends until she gets it down—”

He broke off as the stairs creaked. Futaba wobbled her way up them, her new uniform as utterly out of place on her frame as a clown in a business suit. The leggings she’d been wearing in place of tights were balled up in her hand, and while Yuuki was used to her bare legs, it seemed different, somehow, than when she was wearing her usual shorts.

Then again, the tie at her neck gave him the same feeling.

“Sure,” Yuuki said, knowing that he and Boss could hash out the details later. Futaba collapsed into her chair, picked up her spoon, and proceeded to eat much more slowly than before.

How in the world she could eat all of that was a mystery.

He guessed it had to do with her mother. If Wakaba wasn’t a great cook, maybe Futaba was used to scarfing down meals to avoid tasting them—or maybe, like Yusuke, it was just that she wasn’t used to having an abundance of decent food to eat readily available.

(“Nakanohara keeps his cupboards full,” Yusuke had said one day, over the sound of rain hitting Leblanc’s roof and the white noise of the cafe downstairs. He had frowned, as if he couldn’t believe that anyone would want to buy things other than art supplies, which Yuuki had slowly learned he hoarded. If it went on sale Yusuke snapped it up in a heartbeat, then let it sit in a pile in his room, waiting for the day he would finally use it.

Granted, Yuuki didn’t know how much of his supplies he used. He could just be going through that many pencils and crayons and sketch books to need to have more always on hand; Yuuki didn’t know, and was too afraid to ask.)

But that wasn’t her fault: it was her mother’s, the same way Yusuke’s problems had all derived from Madarame. It made Yuuki wonder what was so great about a woman so devoted to—so obsessed with—her research that she forgot to feed her one and only daughter.

Yuuki’s parents, workaholics both, had still managed to come home every night for dinner. If one wasn’t there, then the other was, and Yuuki remembered sitting on the couch watching TV until his mom called for dinner, letting the scent of whatever she was cooking make him hungrier. His dad tried, but more often than not if it was just the two of them they went out to Wild Duck or ordered in.

Yuuki missed those days, when all he had to worry about was missing the latest episode of Featherman and doing well on a test. He’d been happier, though friendless.

“Anyway,” Futaba said, once Boss had gone back downstairs to tend his shop. She gestured to his books with her spoon, dripping a bit of rice soaked in curry sauce on the table. “That’s all baby stuff. You’ll get it in no time flat, trust me; the stuff you were making before is a lot more advanced.”

“If you say so,” he said, picking up her splatter with a napkin.

“Ooh, you know what? You could make a website about that—that Ciel place! Akira’s gonna have a ton more people helping him out, but no one’s going to know a thing about it or who he is, right? You can help them out!”

“I don’t know about that,” he said. It wasn’t as if he was an expert—and it wasn’t as if he could ask Akira for details on things he couldn’t remember, like exactly how Goro managed to be a computer server, or how the people of Ra Ciela even cast magic in the first place. It had something to do with all those spirits flying around—Akira had made a pact with one, even though he was suited to a higher-ranking, more powerful one than the weak Arsene—but Yuuki couldn’t recall how.

Not that it mattered. All the spirits were dead with the planet; no one on the colony ship would be casting magic the old-fashioned way for a long, long time, if they ever went back to it at all.

But Futaba grinned around her spoon. “Just something to think about, that’s all.”

Uh-huh. Sure it was. He knew that look in her eye; she’d bug him about it until he actually did it, the same way she’d convinced Ryuji to steal his phone, or Yusuke to sketch out her favorite characters from Featherman at the rehab center.

Which meant he had to think of something that would appease her, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted.

They went back to their curry. Yuuki’s was cool, but he forced himself to finish it as he thought over the past three years: Kamoshida, Suzui’s suicide attempt, Akira. How badly Yuuki had wanted someone to talk to those first couple of years about everything, and being forced to remain silent because he didn’t want anyone calling him a freak or an attention-whore; how good it felt to finally spit up the truth in front of a whole room of people, whether or not they believed him, simply because he saw a grieving mother and had to do something about it.

How it had hurt that she hadn’t believed him. How it had hurt that others hadn’t believed him—Ryuji’s mother, Yusuke’s guardian, Boss—and how it had hurt when his friends had tried to stick up for him because it meant that he had been right all along: that nothing Akira was going through was something anyone could believe, and that nothing Yuuki knew about it had any weight to it at all.

He had the feeling that the only reason Goro’s mother had even come back was to show the Amamiyas how absurd the whole situation was—even if she’d looked hopeful, even if she’d looked as if she desperately wanted to believe it—but that wasn’t fair to her. She and the Amamiyas lived far enough away from Tokyo that a trip was an investment of their time, and they’d stopped by Leblanc _twice_.

…And now, if they ever came back, he wouldn’t be able to update them about Akira’s situation anymore. Yuuki’s phone didn’t have the new app on it. The old one was useless, and the only proof it had once worked were the rings on his neck and the photos and videos in his gallery.

He fingered his necklace, the chain fine and cool to his touch. If he had to guess, it was silver—because Akira was allergic to aluminum, and the Amamiyas were probably used to buying the better stuff, if they bought it for him at all—and if he allowed himself a fantasy, it used to be Akira’s. He could see Akira wearing it, too, hidden under his shirts, the shimmer of it revealed when he moved, like scales on a fish.

Which, now that he thought about it, seemed entirely plausible. Akira liked fine things—delicately crafted jewelry and finely woven clothing, among others—so why wouldn’t he wear a necklace like this one?

And, now that he thought about that, why had it taken Yuuki so long to realize it? Akira used to go on and on about his crafting skills not being up to his own standards—he’d reworked a plush doll of Arsene numerous times because it just didn’t look right to him—and Yuuki, stupidly, had thought he’d meant the standards of everyone on Earth, where machines did most of the work.

But Akira’s body—the body he was inhabiting on Ra Ciela—wasn’t used to the same coarse things Akira and Yuuki were. Akira’s body had belonged to a prince, pampered and spoiled until the day his soul was shoved out to make room for Akira’s own. No wonder he didn’t like jeans—he’d never worn them before.

“Uh, you okay there, NPC?” Futaba asked him.

“Oh,” he said. “Yeah—I was, uh, just wondering about some stuff.”

“Homework stuff?”

“No,” he said, and realized he was still running his thumb across the necklace.

Futaba grinned at him. “Boyfriend stuff,” she said, sounding like the cat that got the canary.

“Kind of.” He couldn’t remember if he’d mentioned the body-snatching part to anyone; most likely it had gotten lost in the sheer scope of everything else, like the fact that Renaflask had really, honestly, and murderously, wanted Akira dead for a while.

“If it’s not too mushy I don’t mind listening.”

Yuuki shook his head. Bit his lip. Worried at the necklace, and the pair of rings hanging there. According to Akira’s memories, he’d had no idea he was in a body that wasn’t his until they found out about the ceremony and Renaflask’s true identity, and he didn’t know what had happened to his real one, the one on Earth.

But now it was bugging Yuuki: where was Akira’s real body? Where was Ren Amamiya?

So he spelled it out as easily as he could for Futaba, who picked at her curry and kept having to pull her hair out of the way, the disgusted look on her face not helping the heavy feeling in his gut.

It wasn’t as if a full body could travel that distance instantaneously. A soul—raw data—would be a much easier thing to take, and yet both Ren Amamiya and Goro Akechi had gone missing, vanishing off the face of the earth to who-knew-where.

“What if he can’t come back?” Yuuki asked, that heavy feeling turning ice-cold and spreading. “What if he—what if they both can’t come back because there’s nothing to come back to? What then, Futaba?”

Futaba sucked at her spoon, a thoughtful crease to her brow. “The security footage did show him just disappearing,” she mused to herself, “so—so you’re not wrong… but that can’t be right, either—but, Ms. Akechi did say that her son…”

And she dwindled down into murmurs, words spoken so low he couldn’t understand them. Yuuki’s teeth worried at his lip; he forced his hand away from the necklace, and the rings, and sat on it to keep himself from daring to worry at them more. He’d already worn some of the polish off and didn’t want to make it worse—but the idea of a pair of bodies floating aimlessly in space, unprotected from the grand, dark vacuum of it, one of them heart-wrenchingly small—

That was too much.

His heart lurched. “Sorry,” he said, softly.

“Don’t be,” Futaba said. “I always thought it was weird—that they just, you know, vanished like that—but now it’s less of a _how_ and more of a _where_. Because—because if that’s what you found out, then it has to be true, somewhat.”

“And it’s not like it’s a matter of switching, or a spoiled prince would’ve wound up here,” Yuuki said, “and we’d know, because he’d be talking in a language we couldn’t understand and playing pranks on the yakuza, probably.”

“Which means they wouldn’t have gone missing.”

He only nodded. Worried at his lips some more; banged his spoon against his plate.

This was stupid, he knew. Worrying over details like this when he couldn’t do a thing to change them, when it was a few years too late to change them, when he had no way to pose the questions to Akira, who was the only person on Ra Ciela he could actually talk to.

“Hey,” Futaba said. “You’ve still got that app on your phone, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s not gone, it just gives me an error message whenever I try to use it.”

She held her hand out. Yuuki stared at it as she waved it, some of her nails painted a neon-green that was beginning to flake off. “Gimme,” she said.

“Why?”

“So I can see if I can make a copy of it. And if I can do that, maybe I can get some big-wigs in the science departments to look at it. Mom knows a lot of them, you know.”

“And they’d do what with it?”

She shrugged. “Who knows?”

He didn’t want to trust her—not with his phone, not with his last connection to Akira. This was the same person who had it stolen in the first place.

But this was also the only person in the world who would understand what made the app tick. Except… “I thought you already looked at it,” he said. “Ryuji said you complained you couldn’t crack it, remember?”

She groaned. “Don’t remind me—that was way too embarrassing. Anyway, now that it’s not connected to anything, that might make it a little easier for me to crack and copy.”

He couldn’t believe that. Forget whatever outside force had given him the connection to Akira in the first place—the app itself had worked in real time, conveying whatever he chose it to, transferring even data and his own emotions. It had picked who it wanted to interact with it—that week Ryuji had stolen it, none of Yuuki’s friends had managed to get the app to respond to them, but a doctor down the street had waltzed in and used it.

This wasn’t just a piece of code. It was like it was alive.

… But that had been when Akira had been on the other side of the screen. Yuuki didn’t know how different it would wind up being now; maybe whatever had made it so strange was gone when the connection was cut.

“How long would it take?” he asked.

Futaba shrugged. “A couple hours. A couple days. Depends on how big the file is, and how much protection’s on it.”

“My train pass is on here, you know.”

“Ugh, right.” She leaned back to stare at the rafters. The spiderwebs someone had cleaned up weeks ago were back, forming thin bridges across the beams. “Golden Week’s not too far off. Stay over at my place for a night or two and we’ll crack it.”

“You sure about that? Boss barely let us have that last sleepover.”

“Then stay in Leblanc.”

He could do that. It would definitely be easier than enduring another of Boss’s stink eyes, even though all they’d done at the last sleepover was cut the connection with Akira and then play nearly every board game Ryuji had brought. Some of them were still stacked on the work bench, sides glossy and new.

He… could do that, if he could forget the fact that he’d talked to Akira almost face-to-face in this dusty attic. Yuuki had married him on this couch. Yuuki had teased him about the rings Ryuji had bought for them, and then only a day later…

If he looked hard enough, he could still see Akira’s crying face on the table. Yuuki had made him look like that, had made him beg and plead and sob as if the world was being torn out from under him. Keeping things as they were would have been easy, but Yuuki knew what Akira wanted deep down: to come back home again.

Yuuki also knew Akira wouldn’t have done a thing if it meant keeping what he had. Akira never would have pushed that button himself, too afraid of losing the things that meant something to him.

Akira wouldn’t have cut the connection if Yuuki hadn’t threatened him with it first.

“Hey, NPC,” Futaba said, softly, “you okay over there?”

Of course not. He missed Akira. Rings and necklaces were fine, but they were different from a warm body next to his, hair tickling his cheek, the quiet thunder of another person breathing right beside him. They were different from words traded across dimensions—different from smiles and laughs and promises—different from dancing joy and smoldering looks in another’s eyes.

He touched his ring, as absent-mindedly as ever.

“I’m alive,” he said.

* * *

Yusuke Kitagawa stared at his canvas, as blank as the moment he’d started two hours ago.

Graphite stared back at him from the sketch taped to his wall; the app on his phone stared as well, as if it knew what he’d done.

One click was all it would take. Two or three would end it for good, but one tap, one misplaced press, and he would have to live with the consequences.

He didn’t think he could. Just the lie had been hard—but this would make it Sisyphus’s boulder, weighing heavier and heavier the longer he tried to keep it up, the longer he had to keep going, until eventually his feet would slip out from underneath him, leaving him at the mercy of his sins.

“Yusuke,” Nakanohara called from the living room.

 _I’m saved_ , Yusuke thought, though he dropped his phone and paint brush to the floor as if they were live wires turned into snakes. Nakanohara had a way of sneaking around his own apartment as if he were a ghost, and sometimes Yusuke wondered whether he’d picked that habit up from his time at Madarame’s.

He wondered if he picked it up, too.

“What was that?”

“You, ah, startled me,” Yusuke explained as Nakanohara appeared in the doorway. He frowned at the canvas, the easel, the brush; Yusuke inched the empty palette out of his sight, letting him stare at the tubes of paint littering the floor. “Is something the matter?”

“Dinner is ready,” was the response. His frown grew deeper. “I thought you said you weren’t ready to paint again.”

Yusuke tried for a laugh that fell flat. “I’m not. I just—I only wanted to feel what it was like, again. The brush in my hand, an empty canvas to tarnish however I please…”

The app on his phone, letting him procrastinate. It was easy to think he wouldn’t do a thing until the paintings were complete—perchance someone else would deign to do the dirty work for him, and he wished for it desperately—and it was easy to think he wouldn’t paint until he was ready, but the app made him seek out the old evils, the necessary ones, the ones that made his heart race for entirely different reasons.

It was easy, sticking himself in a thought loop that made his head spin and his stomach churn.

Nakanohara hummed, more to himself than to Yusuke. He’d liked to hum as he painted and sketched, and even now with those years behind him, he still took to the noise when he cooked or cleaned, and Yusuke wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Nakanohara hummed filling out paperwork. He watched as he took in the sight of Yusuke behind an easel, the slump to his shoulders belying how long he’d been there.

“Well, come eat before it gets cold,” Nakanohara finally said, with a look on his face Yusuke recalled from the rehab center: pity in his eyes and jealousy in the tightening of his hands, imperceptible except if one knew him.

Hot food was always welcome. It made Yusuke feel fuller, more satisfied, than if he’d simply tugged something out of the fridge and gulped it down because he didn’t have time to heat it. And this was home-cooked, not leftovers or takeout.

Yusuke did not miss scrimping for change for stale bread from the school store. He—and he was sorry to admit it, because generosity wasn’t something he was inclined to decline—did not even miss Leblanc’s curry, Boss having given him nearly a week’s worth of “unsellable” fare the last time he visited.

Apparently he was still too thin for most people’s liking. Yusuke was just glad he couldn’t see his own ribs anymore without sucking in his gut.

“Alright,” he said.

Nakanohara left the door. Yusuke let out a breath and sagged in relief, gaze pulled like a magnet to his phone on the floor.

It would be so easy. Two or three taps.

But he didn’t think he could live with a lie. It was hard enough for him not to blurt everything out over the past year. It was hard enough to hold it inside when he felt fit to explode with it.

Desire was a fickle mistress, he decided over dinner. Nakanohara hummed when he wasn’t chewing, and made small talk, and Yusuke tried to answer as best as he could, but everything felt off, as if he was trapped behind a wall of ice, deadening him to the world outside of his own head.

Perhaps it was obvious. Perhaps it wasn’t, but Nakanohara with the same trained eye as Yusuke caught it anyway. “Yusuke,” he said, in a tone that dragged Yusuke back to himself.

“Yes?”

“I’m glad you’re painting again,” he said slowly, haltingly. As if it hurt to, and the hurt was there on his face, too, plain to see. “You did always love it.”

“It was all I had,” Yusuke said. Where other children his age received novels and toys for their birthdays, Yusuke got paints and brushes. A bigger easel, more canvases. Charcoal sticks and watercolors. The other students at the atelier scraped together enough change to buy a small, stale cake from grocery stores or department stores or the local bakery and hand-made his cards. He remembered signing his own fair share, and chipping in yen he’d found on walks at the park.

Madarame, aside from his gifts of art supplies, never cared to.

Nakanohara’s face soured as if he, too, could remember it: taking turns scraping every last bit of frosting off the tray, the sugar clinging to his tongue even as his belly ached for more. Yusuke, with his wrists too thin and bony even at eight or nine, giving Ishida a his portion because she’d been bothered by someone on the train and it haunted her, and he thought that the food would help her feel better.

(He wondered what really happened, sometimes. Certainly it was bad, and he could guess at what, but that was all they were: guesses. She’d left one day like all the rest, and now he would never know.)

He’d painted her as she was, once, when no one was around to comment on it. How her despair rolled off of her in waves, how she seemed to withdraw into herself, how she could smile and insist she was fine even as her eyes betrayed her. Madarame had found it and clucked his tongue and said, “Yusuke, you can do better than this,” but had taken it anyway. Yusuke didn’t know where it was, or how much it sold for, but wished that that single painting could have been private. His, and his alone, when he had nothing else to his name.

“It was all a lot of us had,” Nakanohara said at last, as if to chase the thoughts away. “But you still love it, even now. That’s more than can be said for most of us, you know.”

“I do,” Yusuke said. At Madarame’s trial they’d sat in the audience and recognized names, faces, pictures in black frames cradled in the arms of stony-faced friends and formerly distant family. More than a few of the old students were turned away at the door for being too filthy to enter the courtroom, revenge manic in their eyes, their fingers twitching for pens and papers as their teeth rotted in their mouths.

Lawyers were still going through unclaimed pieces, trying in vain to tie them to the artists they belonged to. Yusuke knew most of them would never be found.

Nakanohara took a steadying breath and said, “That’s why I’m happy for you. You’ve found someone who makes you want to paint again. I don’t have to like it, but that doesn’t mean I’ll turn you out for it, either.”

Yusuke focused on his nearly empty bowl of rice. “What do you mean?”

“I was an artist, too, Yusuke. Do you think I don’t know the face of someone in love?”

Yusuke choked. Nakanohara hadn’t had a view of the sketch on the wall, so how—

“It should have been obvious from the beginning,” Nakanohara went on. “I thought it was odd, the way you were behaving last year, but the more I thought on it, the more I realized what it was. That was why you went along with that ridiculous story—but you shouldn’t feed someone else’s delusions, Yusuke. If you truly love him, you’ll help him heal.”

“How—how do you—”

“If it was that gremlin of a girl I think I’d question your tastes,” he said, “and if it was that loud one, well…”

Nakanohara shrugged. Ryuji was, by and large, a very loud person; from the way he dressed to the way he talked, he all but threw himself out into the world. Yusuke valued his input in the same way he valued the input of his peers, and enjoyed spending time with him for the exuberance he displayed for even the most mundane of things and the fluidity of his expressions.

But Nakanohara wasn’t stupid. A day with Ryuji may as well have been a week. Yusuke came home exhausted whenever they hung out, his sketchbook full of facial studies and Ryuji’s laughter still ringing in his head.

“Ryuji is just a good friend of mine,” he tried anyway.

Nakanohara raised a brow. “I never said he was the one you’re in love with, Yusuke. He’s just, well… loud. I tried to picture it but couldn’t. I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

Perhaps it should have. Nakanohara picturing his love life wasn’t the sort of thing Yusuke imagined him doing; he wondered whether that was what other people did, conjure up scenarios of all the people in their lives as if they were playing God.

“I suppose it doesn’t,” Yusuke told him, just to ease the concern in his expression.

“Honestly, I wondered when you were going to tell me, but then realized that that wasn’t something you were going to do. It just isn’t in your nature; you’ve always been a very private boy. So, when I saw you at the easel today, I only thought to bring it up. You can talk to me about this, you know.”

“I do.”

He just wasn’t sure how much help Nakanohara would be, believing Yuuki to be deranged. Nakanohara hadn’t seen the app. He hadn’t seen how badly affected Akira was, that week Ryuji had forcefully separated them. Futaba had even said that no AI in existence could mimic the human ways so clearly, and if that wasn’t a testament to Akira’s humanness, Yusuke didn’t want to know what was.

And besides, Yusuke had the new app on his new phone. That was enough proof it was all real, but it was painfully obvious Nakanohara would never understand.

He’d done beautiful landscape paintings. His mind was too logical to dream up anything else.

But, maybe…

“I,” he started, then stopped. The food was getting cold. His new phone was a weight on his shoulders he’d hoped to erase the day he threw his old one in the lake.

But Nakanohara was patient. He got plenty of practice with that at his job, and picked at his food to give Yusuke time to puzzle out what he wanted to say.

Once he took the app out of the equation, it was really very simple.

“I want to tell him,” Yusuke said. “I know it isn’t fair of me to push my feelings onto him when he’s already committed to someone else, but I can’t stand the thought of holding onto it forever. That’s why I thought, if I painted how I felt, it would be easier. But, I can’t—I can’t even—”

Couldn’t even bring himself to open the tubes of paint on the floor. Couldn’t even bring himself to figure out what color combination would create the hue of Yuuki’s hair, or the flush of his cheeks, or the adoring look in his eyes. Couldn’t even bring himself to touch a dry brush to a blank canvas.

“No one ever said love was easy, Yusuke,” Nakanohara said, softly.

“I didn’t think it would be so—so difficult. So hard.”

“Well, it could be that love is what will propel you to paint again. Love makes fools of man; you know the sorts of things people have done for the ones they love. That’s the kind of power it has.”

Yusuke wanted to laugh. Nakanohara didn’t know the half of it; Yusuke wanted to hide Yuuki away until the scars in his mind were gone, to keep him safe as he healed. Yusuke wanted to trace lines all over his body, until he believed he was beautiful even if everyone else called him plain.

Instead, Akira had done that. From dimensions away and without touching a single finger to Yuuki’s skin, Akira had done that.

And Yusuke hated it. He wasn’t sure whether he hated Akira or the fact that someone else had gotten to Yuuki first, but he hated it.

It would be easy to find out. One tap, and he would venture down the path of learning for himself.

But, how long would it take?

(Since when was he the type of person to balk at an unknown time frame?)

“You sound as if you know about it,” Yusuke said. Mankind seemed to be the only species to fall in love; why did it surprise him, thinking of Nakanohara as being the same as any other man on Earth?

“I do,” Nakanohara said. “I did foolish things for love, once. I—I don’t want to see you do the same, Yusuke. I don’t want you to walk down a path of selfishness like that.”

“Selfishness? Is it selfish to love someone?”

But Nakanohara didn’t answer. He went back to his cold food, and Yusuke, not wanting to pressure him, did the same. There would always be things they couldn’t talk about; there would always be things Yusuke didn’t want to share, and he had no doubts that there were things that Nakanohara didn’t want to bring to the light of day. Some skeletons were better left buried in the dark.

They cleaned up. Nakanohara washed, and Yusuke dried, the both of them in comfortable silence. That, too, was something left to them from years of studying under Madarame: the best environment for painting was quiet, and he tended to punish roughhousers by withholding their scant allotment of food. No one else ever saw an extra scrap on their plates, and speculated that he took it and ate it himself.

It was just the kind of thing Madarame would do.

As he set the plates and bowls down to dry completely, Yusuke thought of the snacks in the cupboards, the cans of vegetables and bags of rice piled up beneath the counters. Nakanohara had ensured he would never go hungry again, and extended that same goodwill to Yusuke, whose mind was still boggled by the idea that, if he ever woke hungry in the middle of the night, there was plenty for him to eat. He would never have to gulp down water and wish it was soup ever again. He would never have to hide his favorite snacks from anyone ever again, and to eat them so sparingly the taste of them fresh out of the package was like a dream.

“Nakanohara,” he said, as his guardian went about making after-dinner tea.

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

_For taking me in. For providing me with food. For being understanding when most would not._

He hoped it got through. Whether it did or not, however, Nakanohara only nodded and said, “Of course,” like it hadn’t nearly been a matter of life or death for Yusuke.

(Well, he supposed that was a bit dramatic.)

Was it selfish to love someone? Yusuke didn’t think so; he retreated back to his room and the easel and his phone on the floor. Akira was on the other side of that phone.

Yusuke could help him come home. Yusuke could make Yuuki happy even if it meant driving a stake right through his own heart.

And… he couldn’t, too.

He could be selfish. He could leave Akira there on the floor, and try to win Yuuki over as the years went by, could console him every time March came around and Akira wasn’t there. There was always the chance that someone else would help Akira, however, and as much as he didn’t want to give Yuuki up, he didn’t want Akira to saunter onto the scene without him knowing.

Yusuke didn’t want to hurt Yuuki that way, to make him start to love someone else only for his first love to come back. Yusuke didn’t want to put himself in that position, either—what if Yuuki found out he’d lied? What if Yuuki hated him after?

He picked up his phone. There was a scuff on the back from where he’d dropped it, and he rubbed at it. That was the price of selfishness: damage, whether external or internal, seen or unseen.

… He hoped his phone still worked.

Although—sometimes he wondered what he would have done if he’d been one of the ones to get the first app. Would he have deleted it, like so many others? Would he have kept it, thinking it might prove a good distraction from Madarame’s strict deadlines?

He didn’t know. The only thing he did know was that if Yuuki had gotten this second app, Yusuke wouldn’t be sitting here, bemoaning how much he didn’t want to deal with Akira. If Yuuki had gotten the second app, there wouldn’t have been so much heartache, or so much hurt.

(Yusuke wouldn’t have gotten the chance to discover what it felt like, to have someone pressed close to him. To have their scent permeate his very being. To wipe the tears from someone else’s eyes. No one had ever hugged Yusuke the way Yuuki hugged his father: as if letting go would mean being lost at sea and at the mercy of the tides.

Yusuke wanted to know what that felt like so badly his body ached for it, but he wasn’t destined for it.)

But, instead, Yusuke had gotten it: the app. Akira.

But not Yuuki.

For a moment he considered leaving it there on his stool and heading to his desk to do some more sketching, but if he left it there he would always leave it there. He would never follow through, the same way he’d thought often of leaving Madarame and yet never committing to it, even with his meager allotment of clothes stashed in a bag in the closet since the day he turned eleven, hoping against hope that this time one of the other students that was leaving would ask him to join them.

Preparation for nothing might as well be no preparation at all, and Yusuke had the only tool he needed right there at his disposal.

He picked up his brush, instead. Spread a generous amount of white paint on the palette—the background wouldn’t matter, but white wouldn’t stand out, and he could always pretend he hadn’t done a thing, couldn’t he—and shoved his brush in it.

Paint, thick and sticky, trailed in ribbons across the legs of his pants and his bare feet as he put that brush to the canvas. Shoved it there, almost, left it hanging while his hand shook and his head began to spin, Madarame’s ghost right behind him, urging him for cleaner strokes, smoother strokes, uniform strokes.

Yusuke moved that brush around the canvas until paint dripped off of it. He moved it until the awful, nauseous feeling produced bile in his throat and put tears in his eyes. He moved it until his hand dropped it, heavy like a hundred-pound weight, to the floor.

It was only painting—but it was so difficult. So hard. Not like it used to be, before every one of Madarame’s students left. Not how he remembered it being—easy, as if the brush propelled his hand instead of the other way around, even if the end result never looked quite the way he wanted it to.

With his other hand, he pressed the app. One tap, one click, one splat of a paintbrush on the floor—that was all it took.

Compared to painting, how hard could it be, bringing Akira home?


	2. Golden Week, Part One

When they’d all had that sleepover, it had felt very definite. Working adults didn’t have sleepovers, they crashed at each other’s places to sleep off the booze or because they missed the last train of the night. _Kids_ had sleepovers, and for that brief night they’d all been kids, gorging themselves on junk food and acting silly over board games.

Then the next morning had come, and Ryuji hadn’t felt any different, but there was a melancholic air to Yuuki that practically hung around him like the stench of cigarette smoke, and Ryuji had thought to himself, _Holy shit, we’re adults now._

As far as he knew, kids didn’t shoulder that kind of shit without breaking, and Yuuki had been sitting on it for a while: the fact that he was going to have to let Akira go. It had hurt him to—it had hurt both of them—but Ryuji thought of his ma back in elementary school, desperately trying to keep her failing marriage together, trying to weather the worst of his dad on her own, trying to earn enough to support all three of them, because like hell was his dad going to do anything other than drink himself into a stupor with every one of his paychecks.

His ma was strong. Yuuki and Akira were strong, too. Ryuji just wished they could _see_ it, damn it.

On his phone screen, the timer hit zero. He blinked at the Game Over in paint-splattered letters and wondered where, exactly, he’d gone wrong in life.

(Kamoshida, probably.)

Futaba, sitting at her desk and tapping at one of her keyboards, only inclined her head a bit to show that she’d heard him groan in frustration. Yuuki’s phone was hooked to her computer; Ryuji was honestly surprised he’d let her touch it, after all the hassle of last year. It had been practically glued to his hand, to the point where just looking at him at some of their parties was like looking at something that was just slightly off-kilter because Yuuki’s hands had been full with plates or drinks.

Ryuji remembered piling food on those plates, because Yuuki was just like Yusuke: too damn skinny for his own good, like eating was some kind of mortal sin—or, in the case of Yusuke, as if paint could substitute for a meal. He also remembered that he’d promised Ann another chat today, and switched to Line to send her a quick message.

 **We don’t even graduate until June** , read her last one. **Do you know how much I’m missing out on????**

 **Not much** , he’d sent back. **Same shit as always, ‘cept they added a part about drinking responsibly to the welcoming speech.**

And she’d sent him a bunch of laughing emojis, like what he said was funny and not the truth. As if Ryuji would ever drink a drop of the stuff, after the shit his dad put his ma and him through.

He didn’t know what time it was in America. Would sending her something now wake her up, or get her in trouble in class? As much as he wanted someone to talk to, it wouldn’t be worth it if she got mad at him.

Ryuji sighed, and went back to Futaba’s latest mobile game. It was some weird one where he had to color in more of the map than the enemy AI, and damn, if they weren’t so smart he might actually be winning. Playing against actual people would probably be easier.

Except he’d seen it before—and he waited for the map to load so he could double-check it—and yes, part of the graphics were bugging out again. The ground was stable, but half of the textures in his little starting area were gone, and he tried flipping the camera this way and that to see if it had spread anywhere else, the little enemy bot running around in the background, squirting everything in sight with a paint gun.

“Hey,” Futaba said, finally leaning away from her monitors. “Why’d you lie?”

“‘bout what?”

“What do you think?”

He tried to come up with something, but was more fixated on covering nonexistent textures with paint. “I dunno,” he said, and shrugged for good measure. “How do you know I lied, anyway?”

“Uh, because I don’t pay you _that_ much, monkey-boy,” Futaba said, and reached out a foot to nudge at his knee. At least she was wearing socks, and for once her butt was touching a seat. “So what did you go and buy those rings for?”

He jerked, staring at her from her bed. Futaba wasn’t grinning, which meant she wasn’t teasing, which meant she was one-hundred percent serious, which was actually kind of scary. Boss must have taught her the art of single-brow-raising, because one of them was up by her hairline. “How do you know I bought rings?” he asked.

He expected to hear that Yuuki had told her. The guy never was very good at withstanding peer pressure when it fell on him, and a couple hours of needling would have been all it took. Instead, Futaba said, “Because the receipt was in your bag. I found it when you told me to get your athletic tape the other day, remember?”

He… had asked her to do that. He also remembered crumpling up his copy and tossing it in there, too, and while he would have been glad to toss his old schoolbag, it turned out it was a good enough replacement for his gym bag, whose handle had snapped a couple weeks ago. Ryuji hadn’t gotten around to shopping for a new one, because his tuition and Yuuki’s rings were eating up his money.

And Futaba knew exactly what rings she was talking about, too. Shit.

_Shit._

“Like, those are kind of expensive just to be a gift, you know,” she went on when he didn’t talk. “And the Amamiyas—how’d they know to give him a necklace to string them on, huh?”

“I didn’t tell them to,” Ryuji said, so low it could have been another one of her fans whirring. “I think—I think they had an idea, about the wedding or something. Maybe Akira told them he was gonna ask, and they figured Yuuki’d say yes, because why wouldn’t he? It was—it was obvious, y’know?”

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said.

“Aren’t you the one who was talking to them? Shouldn’t you know why?”

“I never let them talk back,” she said. Typical. Of course Futaba would pop in with an update, then make it impossible to thank her or track her down. “I didn’t think I could stand it if they started asking questions, so I never let them have the chance to.”

That didn’t mean that they didn’t. That didn’t mean that Ryuji had spent some of that trip listening to all of the Amamiya's neighbors wonder at the mystery of their kid’s disappearance; the guy with the camera footage hadn’t shut up about it, had the video saved to his phone to shove in everyone’s faces.

“Anyway, the NPC could have just bought some cheap ones, right? So, why’d you do it, and why’d you lie to let him let you, huh? He wouldn’t have agreed if he knew how broke you are.”

“Akira’s allergic to that cheap shit,” Ryuji said. “You know how I visited his hometown last year? There was a doctor there—Akira’s doctor—and I overheard him mentioning that he’d been calling all of his doctor buddies to be on the alert for a missing kid who might come in with a bad allergic reaction to metal, that he might pick it up from drinking canned juice or some shit like that.”

Ryuji remembered thinking how awful it must be, to have to watch what you drank, and out of what. He’d done a bit of research afterwards and forgotten half of it within a week—good thing the ring salesman had helpfully pointed them to which rings were good for people like Akira, because Ryuji would have gone with whatever Yuuki picked, no questions asked.

… Good thing Yuuki’s ring was good for people like Akira, too.

… Good thing Yuuki hadn’t really pushed the _but we’re both too broke for this, and you know it_ line, either. He’d caved stupidly easy, in a way that Ryuji knew was bad. They were going to have to work on that.

“And?” Futaba pressed.

Ryuji grit his teeth. His phone had gone dark, and the only light came from Futaba’s monitors and the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her blackout curtain, and her glasses caught it all and glared—and he felt like he was looking at the real Futaba, the hacker who didn’t give a shit about moral grounds or anything a normal person would, who happily jumped on every landmine she could just to watch the world burn.

(Except, as far as he knew, real-life villains weren’t supposed to be schoolgirls nudging their friends with feet clad in thigh-high socks, urging them to spill the beans about their secrets.)

“So he wouldn’t worry it was gonna put me in a hole,” Ryuji finally said. “The good stuff costs money—we all know that—and that was what he needed. Is it—is it _wrong_ , for me to want to help him out a little?”

Futaba only scoffed. “He probably already _is_ worried it put you in a hole. But don’t you think it was a bit much to buy them for him, when he should’ve done it on his own?”

Futaba didn’t know that Ryuji had watched Yuuki stand there in the store and stare at the cases—at the rings—for nearly an hour. He’d been across the alley, standing in the racks of Problem Child, leafing through shirts that were too sheer to be any good at covering anything and enduring the whispers of the girls around him of a guy looking through girl’s clothes. They’d laughed, snickers hidden behind their hands, and it had made him think of a movie he’d seen the week before. It had been a great movie, until the point where the big bad guy was revealed to be gay the whole damn time, and the montage of flashbacks from his perspective had made Ryuji want to puke.

He’d been a guy who was only running blindly after some tail—Ryuji remembered, with startling clarity, that he ranked his love interests by their _asses_ —and it was so fucking wrong that Ryuji didn’t even remember how the movie ended. There hadn’t been a single other gay guy in the whole film, just the asshole scaring the shit out of people.

He hadn’t been able to fight the thought that that was what people thought of people like Yuuki. Men who sashayed around in skin-tight leather pants, wore way too much eyeshadow, and didn’t hesitate to grope anyone and anything that caught their interest.

But Yuuki wasn’t like that. Ryuji would be surprised if he and Akira managed to do more than hold hands for the first month once Akira was back. Yuuki might break at that, even, and Ryuji didn’t know what Akira would do. Combust, from having someone around he could touch whenever he wanted?

“I don’t,” he said. Futaba’s toes flexed on his knee, like a question, or an urging. “I don’t think it’s wrong that I helped him out when he needed it. We’re friends. That’s what friends do.”

Friends didn’t let friends be the butt of a million jokes. Ryuji, with his bleached-blond hair and loud mouth, didn’t care if people poked fun at him—he’d chosen to dye his damn hair, and after his dad and Kamoshida, he’d chosen not to be cowed by someone else’s attitude.

Yuuki hadn’t gotten a damn choice. Akira hadn’t gotten a damn choice. To make fun of them for something they couldn’t help, something that was as much a part of themselves as Futaba’s photographic memory was to her, that was pretty fucking shitty.

Ryuji hated it. Naturally, the best way to strike back at the assholes who thought guys like Yuuki and Akira shouldn’t be happy was to make them the happiest they’d ever been.

It had just been expensive, that was all.

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said slowly, like she was just going along with it. “Sure.”

Ryuji scowled at her and shoved her foot away; she squealed, her chair spinning around, the wire of her headphones caught on the armrests and pulling at the tower on the floor.

“No!” she shrieked, with her foot still outstretched. It smacked into one of the shelves by her desk, making the Featherman figures on the top rattle. Feather Blue fell over.

Futaba’s idea of “helping” tended to be hacking into mainframes and digging up blackmail material. Yuuki was still a student last year, and the only dirt she’d managed to get on him was his search history—and while Ryuji felt embarrassed for him, it wasn’t anything Ryuji himself hadn’t looked up before all of… this—which was why Ryuji had had to go steal the damn phone.

And now here she was, laughing at him for feeling shitty over being shitty, for wanting to be a good friend when they both knew she’d never had any to compare him to, for wanting to be better than most of Japan.

Ryuji wasn’t going to let the whole country laugh at his best friend. No fucking way.

Ryuji was also never, ever, going to tell Yuuki that. Yuuki would dive headfirst into depression—that Ryuji was only being his friend because he felt sorry for him, that Ryuji only did everything he had because he felt sorry for him—and if Akira still wasn’t back…

Well, even if Akira came back, Ryuji would never say a word. Not a thing.

“‘Sides, he’s gonna pay me back eventually,” he said. “It might not be in cash, and it might take forever, but he said he would, and I’m gonna hold him to it. That way he doesn’t feel like he’s just taking shit from all of us.”

Futaba, who had been busy disentangling herself from her headphones cord and righting Feather Blue, just said, “If you say so.”

“If you’re gonna be like that, why’d you even ask?”

She shrugged. “Because. I’ve got nothing better to do while the data’s being copied, the NPC isn’t here, and picking on you’s the next best thing.”

“What would you do if he was here? Pick on him?”

She grinned. “I’ve got a lot of doujinshi he might be interested in—”

“Ugh, no, stop, stop it,” he groaned, and she cackled. “I don’t think he’d want to look at anything you’ve got, anyway—”

“It’s good stuff!” she protested.

“It’s doujin, it’s not good—”

“Ha! So you _have_ seen some! How else would you know? Besides, these are the _good_ artists. Do you really think I’d settle for lightsaber dicks and censor bars?”

“TMI,” he muttered, in a way the he hoped showed her how much he didn’t want to continue this conversation. He was eighteen; he could buy whatever the hell he wanted, now, as long as it was legal. This was also not a conversation he’d been expecting to have with a girl, seventeen or not.

It felt weird.

Futaba only snickered at him, her feet swinging, propelling her back and forth, back and forth. Maybe what she’d wanted all along was friends: to tease, to help, to relentlessly dig up blackmail on their enemies for. She seemed way, way happier than the day he first met her—a scraggly-haired goblin of a girl with her roots showing and eyes as big as saucers, too afraid of everyone to let them so much as touch her—and wondered what had really happened over the past year.

It felt weird. It felt—as corny as it was—like fate. Like they were destined to meet—him and Futaba and Yusuke, and in a way, Yuuki and Ann and Shiho. Hell, Ryuji was still texting Ann and Shiho near-daily, years after they’d both moved away.

If that wasn’t friendship—if that wasn’t fate—what was?

Futaba, thank God, broke his train of thought with another quiet snicker. “Don’t tell me you’re picturing it.”

“No,” he said, though for a split second it flashed through his head. Damn her. “Just—I thought it was kinda weird, how we all met ‘n shit. Like, Ann dragged me to the rehab center her friend was at, and we all kinda bonded over how shitty adults were, but I don’t think she would’ve had the idea if she hadn’t taken Yuuki there first, you know?”

“Uh, no,” she said, “but go on.”

Ryuji shook his head. He didn’t have the words to describe it, just the sensation that being friends with these guys felt right, somehow. He owed it all to Ann, of course, but… “You remember when that Shido guy was trying to run for Prime Minister, but the Amamiyas got it nulled or some shit? We saw it on the news at the center, and Yuuki just—he got all pale, like he’d seen a ghost. We thought it was weird. It was the only thing we could talk about with each other for weeks, when he wasn’t there. ‘N then you showed up and mentioned you could hack.”

“It wasn’t my fault your phone had all that junk on it,” she said.

“And—I dunno, maybe it’s dumb—but it kinda feels like Akira was the one to bring us together like this, in the end. That’s all. So maybe I did it to thank him, too.”

“Is Akira really our friend?”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He considered Akira a friend, sure, even though they’d never met face-to-face, even though Akira had hated him—hated most of them, really—for a good few months and had only thawed out when Yuuki said it was okay. Hell, Akira only wanted to talk to Yuuki, even when there were other people in the room, and sometimes when he got quiet Ryuji would pass by his phone to hear him muttering questions to himself, and it was all mostly junk about Yuuki: what food he might like, what kind of clothes he liked to wear, what kind of subjects he was good at in school.

Ryuji would’ve told him, if he could. Ryuji would’ve stuck to Akira’s side like glue, if it meant that lonely look in his eyes when Yuuki wasn’t around disappeared. Ryuji would’ve been his friend.

He’d bought rings for the dude. He thought that was enough to prove how much he wanted to start everything over like new. Wipe the slate clean, so to speak. Akira never had to know who bought them, but Ryuji liked to imagine telling him one day: “You’re both my friends, and I want you to be happy.”

It was corny as shit, though. Futaba would laugh her head off at him, if she wasn’t staring down at her trash heap of a floor like she was realizing what an absolute ass she could be. If it hadn’t been for Futaba, Ryuji never would have taken Yuuki’s phone. If it hadn’t been for Futaba, they wouldn’t have found out half of what they did, because all of that shit spurred Yuuki on to spill the beans.

But he grinned at her, and nudged her with his foot, laughing as she squealed some more in disgust. “Course he is,” he said. “And if he don’t think so, we’ll just have to prove it.”

“Prove it how?” Futaba asked, shoving his foot away from her. She acted like it smelled; maybe it was sweaty, or something. That could be pretty gross.

“I dunno,” Ryuji said.

Futaba glared at him.

“What? You think I have some kinda—grand master friend plan, or something? ‘Cause I don’t, okay. I didn’t plan out how to be friends with you, ‘taba.”

“I know that,” she grumbled, and checked on of her monitors. “It’s just—is making friends really so easy? He hates us. I’ll be surprised if we aren’t ‘Yuuki’s friends’ for a good while after he gets back, you know.”

“So we just gotta think of a way to say sorry.”

“Sorry, huh,” she muttered. She ran a finger over her keyboard, the backlights disappearing and reappearing in smooth but irritating motions. “And what if he doesn’t like it?”

“Then we either give up or hope he changes his mind someday,” Ryuji said. “I think—I think he cares too much about what Yuuki thinks, and who he’s friends with. He’ll try to get along with us to make Yuuki happy, but I dunno if that’ll work in the long run. Not everybody’s compatible, even as friends, ‘taba.”

“Yeah,” she said, soft and low, making him wonder if she was about to cry. It wouldn’t be right for him to stick around if she did, and it wouldn’t be right if he asked why this whole conversation got her so down so fast. Futaba had been in that rehab center for a reason, after all, even if he didn’t know why.

But. He had to try, even if she kicked him out. “You wanna talk about it?”

“It’s seven,” she said instead. “Time for dinner.”

“Yeah,” he said, wondering what the hell he’d done wrong but knowing not to pry, “guess it is.”

Some people were happier leaving their skeletons in the closet, after all.

* * *

Futaba and Ryuji trailed into Leblanc in the wake of a large party Yuuki was struggling to clean up after. They’d taken up every booth and had stolen the stools from the bar counter to sit closer to their friends; one woman had a toddler, and the high chair Boss had dragged out of storage dripped curry down its front legs. Futaba stopped in the doorway and stared at the mess; Ryuji moved in from behind her and dragged the high chair over to the sink. He wet a washcloth and started at it.

“You don’t have to do that,” Yuuki told him, even though his arms were full of plates.

“I’d be a dick if I didn’t,” Ryuji said, and kept scrubbing.

Futaba, though, sidestepped the mess and scurried up the stairs. Boss, who’d been busy rearranging his bar stools, glanced at the clock and shook his head. “It’s that late already?”

“It’s only seven,” Ryuji said.

“Time flies when you’re watching a toddler shove his face into curry,” Yuuki said, and took a bit of pride in the slight smile Boss made at his joke.

They took a while cleaning up. Boss left them alone for the most part, taking a plate up to Futaba in the attic and coming back down with a frown on his face from the stash of drinks they’d all left there. Yuuki had made sure to take all of the canned coffee home with him after the sleepover, and knew that while nothing up there was caffeinated, Boss was probably more than a little peeved that they didn’t want to drink his coffee—not even the special decaf beans he had a whole shelf of, now.

But it was late. Not too late, but late enough that drinking coffee now would have Futaba up for half the night, thoroughly throwing off her tenuous hold on a proper sleep schedule. She could eat and drink what she liked when she didn’t have to be awake at six in the morning six days a week, and they all knew that—but that didn’t mean that Boss had to like it.

Boss also didn’t have to like checking to be sure she was taking her pills, either. Yuuki had walked in on them one week, and if he hadn’t taken her mentions of the rehab center seriously before then, he did after. There were only a couple of bottles tucked into her schoolbag or her next dosage of pills tucked into her pockets, but it felt like a couple bottles too many.

Then again, who was he to talk? He’d come out of his therapy sessions just by talking at someone for an hour a week about anything he could think of—up to and including Akira, who he’d only mentioned near the tail end of his saving’s account’s lifespan—without prescriptions to take and a pill regimen to follow.

He should feel luckier. He could be like Futaba, having hallucinations and hearing voices anytime her anxiety got too bad. He could be trying to protect himself by staying shut in his apartment for years, never coming out unless he had to.

He didn’t. But that was comparing apples to oranges—no two people could be exactly the same, no matter how similar their circumstances were.

(But did he need to feel guilty about feeling like shit some days, just because someone else had it worse?)

Boss laid out dinner for them on the bar, and Yuuki felt guilty enough about the drink stash upstairs that, when Boss asked them if they wanted coffee, he said yes. Ryuji disappeared up the stairs with his plate.

Yuuki turned to follow, but Boss caught at his arm. “Hold on a sec,” he said.

Yuuki’s heart leaped into his throat. “Yeah—uh, yes, sir?”

Boss sighed. He had to know by now that Yuuki only called him sir when he was nervous—and that Yuuki was a bundle of nerves on a good day, much less a day like today with a cafe full of raucous college kids, their high-school friends, and the rather young couple’s toddler—but shook his head at whatever reprimand he was thinking of. “Don’t you think it’s about time you learned how to work the brewer? I can’t do it all the time, you know.”

“The—the brewer?” The coffee siphons, glass bulbs like beakers from old anime, sitting in copper stands. Boss had wiped the soot off the bottom of one, and the rag he’d used sat behind the bartop, gray with age.

Those brewers had to be expensive. Yuuki didn’t know what he’d do if he broke one.

“I—um, I don’t really know about that,” he said, eyeing how delicate they looked. “Maybe, uh, I can grind the beans first?”

Boss blinked at him. “Huh,” he said.

“What?”

“Most people don’t want to learn the grinding first. Lord knows I didn’t,” Boss explained, scratching the back of his head. “I thought it looked cooler to be working the brewers. The ladies sure liked it.”

“I’m not trying to impress anyone,” Yuuki told him. He had the feeling that, if he tried, he’d fail spectacularly—and the only person he really wanted to impress was Akira, anyway. “Well, not yet.”

Boss gave him a knowing smile and led him back behind the counter. He pulled a jar of beans off the shelf—ones Yuuki had been learning about over the past month—scooped some out, and then started up his explanation.

If there was one thing Yuuki liked about working for Boss, it was how hands-off he was about teaching. He’d talk Yuuki through one task or another or give him an example of how it was supposed to be done and then lean back and watch, and as Yuuki worked at the grinder, the most he did was tell him whether he was moving too fast or too slow, and how to tell when the grounds were at the right consistency.

Like everything in the cafe, it would take practice for Yuuki to get down. At least Boss was patient, walking him through the steps with the brewer next, even though Yuuki didn’t want to touch it yet.

And that was okay, Yuuki thought. One step at a time, no matter how ready Boss thought he was. Once he could grind beans without needing to look for Boss’ opinion, he’d be ready to run the brewer.

By the time they were done, Yuuki’s curry had grown cold. He popped it in the microwave in the kitchen, grabbed his cup of coffee, and headed upstairs.

Futaba, who could normally eat a plate of curry in ten minutes flat and come running back for more, was only halfway through her plate. Ryuji was scraping the last of the rice off of his, and they both looked up as he appeared.

“Hey, man,” Ryuji said.

“Hey,” he said, unsure of why he felt so weird all of a sudden. Futaba’s eating habits couldn’t be affecting him this much, could it? She’d never picked at her food like this before.

He looked at Ryuji, then dared a glance at Futaba as he sat down, hoping the message got through. It must have, because Ryuji shrugged, then reached for a bottle of juice Yuuki remembered buying last year and took a swig.

He grimaced. Yuuki did, too, and tucked into his plate.

Futaba, though, put down her spoon. “So, uh,” she said, looking off to the side of the table where her bottle of limeade sat, nearly as untouched as her food. “Ryuji and I were talking earlier, and—do you think Akira would want to be friends with us?”

“Why wouldn’t he?” Yuuki asked.

“Because to him, we’re the guys who took you away from him, even if it was only for a week,” Ryuji said. “You forgave us, but we don’t know if he will. I thought maybe he’d only be friends with us because you are already—that’s probably what ‘taba’s getting at.”

She nodded, and added, “We were kind of jerks to him without knowing it. I don’t know—I mean, I don’t think that’s something that’s so easy to get over. It’s not like he can just flip a switch and forgive us. He was pretty pissed.”

That was true. Sometimes, when he really felt like crap after a long day, he watched some of the videos he took of Akira. He’d never gotten nearly as mad at Yuuki as he had at Ryuji, Futaba, and Yusuke that one week. He’d refused to even talk to them outright, shoving away any attempts of theirs to communicate.

But…

If it hadn’t been for that week, maybe Akira wouldn’t have decided to confess. Maybe he never would have, and Yuuki wouldn’t have rings around his neck or a promise to look forward to. Maybe Yuuki wouldn’t have a photo of Akira in a bridal kimono to stare at when he started to doubt Akira would actually come back.

Akira would come back. He had to come back—he had Yuuki waiting for him, after all, and he wasn’t the type to use and throw people away like so many others. Akira had been used and nearly thrown away by the people of that distant world, and he had hated every last conniving minute, every last twisted word, every last knowing smirk.

Compared to those people, the three of them were nothing.

“I don’t think you need to worry so much,” he said, pushing his rice around to avoid Ryuji and Futaba’s stares. “I think he knows how much you wanted to help him, even if he didn’t at first. It was suddenly being taken away from me he didn’t like—if you apologize I’m sure he’ll forgive you. He probably already did, and didn’t want to admit it while he was still over there.”

Ryuji nodded with a grin, but Futaba didn’t look convinced. She had grabbed her bottle of limeade at some point and was fiddling with the cap, pushing the seal band on the bottom around and around with her finger.

So Yuuki went on: “I don’t think he would’ve wanted to sit with us at the parties if he didn’t already forgive you. He was just talking out loud most of the time, but if he didn’t want you to hear him he wouldn’t have been saying anything. You saw how quiet he was when he was mad at you; you had to have noticed the difference, Futaba.”

“He was talking to you, though,” Futaba said, quietly. “Not us.”

“And if he wanted it to be a private conversation, he would have said so,” Yuuki argued. When the Amamiyas had visited—when Ms. Akechi had shown up that first time—Akira had asked to talk to them privately, without anyone else around. There was no way for him to tell if Yuuki was doing as he asked, but if Yuuki hadn’t, it might have bled over through the telepathic link they’d shared. Akira, he felt, wouldn’t have trusted him after, so he always had. “Instead, he let you guys listen as he cooked, and sewed, and even as he sorted through his wardrobe. Boss told me he got to pick from a few prompts a couple of times—doesn’t that mean Akira’s already forgiven you? He let you in as far as I was, those first two years.”

Minus the flirting, naturally. Yuuki had barely been able to comprehend it the first handful of times, but there had been a subtle teasing edge to his tone that hadn’t been present with anyone else. It was still kind of hard to believe that someone had taken enough interest in someone like Yuuki, of all people, to flirt and tease and mean it.

(And he was kind of miffed he hadn’t gotten the chance to really flirt back. What if he was bad at it, and it put Akira off?)

“How ‘bout this, then, ‘taba,” Ryuji said, when Futaba continued to stare at her drink. “You tell us what’s really bothering you and we’ll see if we can help.”

Yuuki looked up from Futaba—who looked shocked—to see Ryuji across the table, brows knit even as he tried to grin like it was nothing, as if he hadn’t just read Futaba like an open book while Yuuki was sitting there wondering how many different languages the human body could make on its own. Had he missed something, during that whole monologue of his? Had he missed something from before they even came into the shop?

Futaba scuffed her shoe on the chair and said, “It’s not that big a deal.”

“Sure it is,” Ryuji said. “It’s bothering you, ain’t it?”

“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to,” Yuuki said, hoping Ryuji got the message: that they couldn’t make her say a thing. It was up to Futaba to talk or not, and it wouldn’t be right to press her to.

She played with her bottle. Put it down on the table and picked up her spoon and scraped up lines of curry sauce off her plate.

Dawdling, like Yuuki used to, sometimes. Tying his laces extra slow because Kamoshida always followed the first handful of people out to the gym. Taking way too long breaking down a word problem in the margins of his math tests, because the actual math took him forever anyway.

… Learning how to grind the beans first, instead of jumping straight into brewing.

He and Ryuji gave her her space. Ryuji gathered up his dishes and took them downstairs to wash; Yuuki picked the rest of his food off in nibbles he hoped would help her feel a bit better. His coffee had grown lukewarm, and the acid taste of it clung to his tongue.

But Futaba, when everything else was cleared away and the light coming in the window was gone, finally said, “When I was in middle school, I didn’t have any friends.”

 _Oh_ , Yuuki thought.

“I didn’t have any friends before then, either,” she said. “They all thought I was weird because I could remember things that no one else could—all the titles on a bookshelf when I’d only gotten a glance, what one of our classmates wrote in a love letter after only getting a peek, stuff like that. They tried to tell me I was a demon, or a spirit, or something. I guess they thought that because I wasn’t like them, it meant I had to be inhuman, which was stupid, but we were kids.”

She shrugged, acting like it didn’t bother her, but it had to. It had bothered Yuuki when his own bullies had managed to convince the class to pretend he didn’t exist for nearly an entire year; he didn’t want to know what kind of things these kids had done, what things they’d scribbled on her desk, or whether they filled her desk with salt or not.

It had to bother her, because she was sitting there, voice monotone like she was reading from a script. Ryuji was glaring at the table. Yuuki didn’t know what he looked like and didn’t want to know.

“But the girl who sat in front of me in class didn’t care. She said I couldn’t be cheating on my tests, because no one who sat next to me got right answers where I did. It was pretty stupid logic, and no one believed her anyway; her friends all told her to drop it, so she did.”

Ryuji shook his head, jaw clenched to keep from interrupting. He liked to blurt things out as they popped into his head in normal conversation, but this wasn’t the time for that. He and Yuuki stayed quiet as she took a sip of her drink before continuing.

“But she’d say hi to me in the morning if no one else was around. She’d ask me for pencils or erasers, or I’d ask her for some, and that was it. I’d see her writing in a book sometimes, but never really thought anything of it. I thought maybe she was making a schedule, or writing up a story. I never tried to peek at it to find out, ‘cause I got the feeling she’d hate me if I did. Sometimes people don’t want to share that kind of stuff until they think it’s ready, you know?”

Yuuki thought of Akira telling him to wait, the next picture book wasn’t done. He couldn’t think of a good way to end it, and he didn’t want to tell Yuuki an incomplete story—and Yuuki had let him have his time. That was all people needed, sometimes.

“But she dropped it one day, right as I was sitting down. I only got a glimpse of what she writing—it was a diary, and I shouldn’t have, but once I saw it, I couldn’t forget it. She knew that. I knew that. The whole stupid class knew that. I tried to tell her sorry for looking, but she just turned around in her seat and didn’t speak to me again.”

“Shit,” Ryuji said, still glaring at the table. “Was it—was it that bad, ‘taba?”

“Yeah,” she said, and her voice had gone even softer. “I won’t talk about it, though; I promised her I wouldn’t, even though she never spoke to me again. But, I was thinking—she’d be a senior right now, like I’d be if I hadn’t missed school. Do you think—well, would it be okay if—if I just asked her if she was doing better? Anonymously. As Medjed.”

“I think she’ll freak out if a famous hacker group texts her out of the blue,” Ryuji said.

“Does she have a Textter account?” Yuuki suggested. “You could follow her and talk to her there. Mona’s a good ice-breaker.”

Futaba grinned. “I could send her the pics I have of him chewing on monkey-boy’s toes.”

Ryuji groaned. “Don’t, please. I still have marks. They still hurt.”

“But he’s adorable,” Futaba protested. “He couldn’t hurt a fly—I watched him once, when there was one in the house. He just flopped his tail at it.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s not a demon-cat,” Ryuji mumbled.

Yuuki couldn’t help but laugh. Mona wasn’t very friendly with anyone other than Futaba, but it was no secret he seemed to especially hate Ryuji, for reasons known only to the cat. Yuuki was sure they were important, too; Morgana, Akira’s guardian in his mind-world, was a cat-boy, and he was proud and cocky and distrusting, too. And, like Mona, he seemed to enjoy being on his own and tending to his shop, although it bothered Akira: it was like Morgana never wanted to talk to him, even though he knew cats weren’t social creatures. He could try and not take it personally as much as he wanted, but when the only other person around barely wanted to talk to him, he wound up taking it hard anyway.

Ryuji kicked his foot under the table. “Don’t laugh,” he said, even though he was grinning, and Futaba was giggling, and everything finally seemed right. The only person missing was Yusuke, who would likely be sitting off to the side to make room for his long legs, and who would have to admit that he didn’t get the joke, if there was one at all. Yuuki had sent him a couple of texts asking for his help and hadn’t heard a thing back yet—but that was normal, for Yusuke. He still tended to get so caught up in his own head that he didn’t notice the world around him, much less his phone going off.

But that was alright. That was what made Yusuke, Yusuke—the same way Futaba’s villainous grins and hyper-fixation made her Futaba, the same way Ryuji’s fluid emotions and obsession with running made him Ryuji. Yuuki could wait a little longer for help.

Still, he’d shoot off another one asking if Yusuke was okay later tonight. He had to know by now that there were people he could trust and talk to, if he wanted or needed to, and Yuuki wasn’t about to make him come begging for it, even if his stomach gave a slight lurch at the thought—Yusuke kowtowing, those long, slender legs folded underneath him, his proud features forced to stare up through those long, long lashes—

 _Stop_ , Yuuki thought. _Stop it._

He had Akira, after all, even though Akira wasn’t here. He couldn’t just… drop him, not after everything they’d been through, and definitely not just because Yuuki was developing a sex drive working overtime to make up for years of being everyone’s doormat. Of course Akira had been the one to give him a taste of what it meant to be special—and now that he knew what that was like, it was hard to go back to being doormat Yuuki, yes-man Yuuki. He was wavering somewhere in the middle of being normal, teetering one way or the other some days, and he hated it.

But the thoughts were always so easy to quash. There and gone in the blink of an eye if he didn’t entertain them—that had to be good, right?

Yuuki risked a glance at his phone and paled; eight-thirty, and Boss hadn’t said a word about him getting back to work. Law said his hours meant he only got half an hour for meals, and he’d taken triple that.

“Crap,” he muttered, and jolted out of his chair. He nearly tripped running down the stairs—Ryuji furrowing his brows and Futaba outright laughing some more—and met Boss in the cafe, sitting in a chair at the bar and muttering to himself over a crossword.

No one else was there, which meant no one saw Yuuki bow as low as he could without kneeling on the floor. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t check the time, or set an alarm, and I didn’t realize how late it got until just now, and—”

“It’s fine,” Boss said.

“It’s not fine!” he cried, and then bit his lip to keep from saying any more. Didn’t Boss know the law? Didn’t he care that Yuuki had vanished from work for almost two hours?

“Kid, look at me,” Boss said, tone still even. Yuuki did: there was a slight dip in his brow, and a frown on his lips, and he was looking at Yuuki the same way he did potatoes with too many bruises or buds on them, as if he was trying to decide whether to keep using them or throw them out entirely.

“If I needed help, I would’ve called you,” Boss said, when Yuuki’s gaze slid to the crossword page. Kanji mixed with Roman letters made into nonsense as his focus slipped. “But no one else came in, and I thought Futaba needed you more than I did. You’re her friends, and there are some things she’ll be more comfortable talking about with you than with me or her mother, and she needed that tonight, and time enough to work up to saying it. Just don’t make it a habit, okay?”

“I understand,” Yuuki said. “I’ll—um, help you close, then.”

Ryuji and Futaba stayed up in the attic, as quiet as mice, until Boss called up the stairs that he was locking the door. Ryuji came down first, a contemplative frown still on his face, and Futaba trailed after, as quiet and wide-eyed as she was when she walked in. Boss stopped Futaba by the sink; Ryuji tugged Yuuki out the door and into the street.

They pretended to be interested in some fliers posted on the alley wall across the way, and Ryuji said, “Thought she was fine back at her place.”

“You couldn’t have known,” Yuuki said. “We get good at hiding it.”

Ryuji scowled, and tore a corner off of a flier for a sale three days ago. “You shouldn’t have to hide it. If you feel like shit, you should say so.”

That was pretty easy for Ryuji to say. He blurted out everything, with no regard, usually, to how it would be taken or how anyone else would react—but Yuuki and Futaba and Yusuke had learned to shut their mouths and wish for it to go away. To wait patiently for the brief better days when life didn’t feel like a noose strangling them to death. “No one really likes to hear that kind of thing, you know,” Yuuki said, and it was true: no relationship could be based solely off of complaining, and if you cried too much people stopped paying attention. Like the boy who cried wolf, except the wolf was always there, grinning a grin full of teeth inside your head.

“I’d want you to,” Ryuji said. “I don’t—I don’t just wanna be friends with the good you, you know. The one who’s happy all the time or whatever. People have more feelings in them than that, and it’s bullshit that you’d think I wouldn’t wanna know about them just because I can’t handle them or whatever.” He scowled some more, peeling more of the flier off, though he wasn’t getting much of it. “That’s what being someone’s friend is about, ain’t it?”

“It’s not about what you’d do or not,” Yuuki said, softly. He almost didn’t want to say it, but Ryuji would never understand otherwise, if he ever did at all. “It’s about what we’d think you’d do or not. There’s a you inside our heads and he’s just as mean as everyone else is sometimes.”

Ryuji jerked to stare at him. He gaped, as if the thought had never occurred to him; but it had to have, at some point. Everyone thought like that at one point or another, and the difference between them and people like Yuuki and Futaba was that the first group got over it faster. Their insecurities were thrown away as soon as the doubt was gone, not left to rot and fester like exposed wounds.

“And, of course,” Yuuki murmured, too embarrassed to admit it, “sometimes you’re fine and a single word washes it down the drain. That’s the worst, I think. You go from being happy to being ready to crawl into a hole and never come out again in less than a second. It sucks.”

Ryuji opened his mouth to say something—but what, Yuuki wouldn’t know, because at that moment Futaba and Boss left Leblanc, the bell on the door jingling. Futaba turned to them as Boss locked it. “Sojiro said you can pick up your phone if it’s done, NPC,” she said. “And if it’s not you can sleep on the couch downstairs. It’s super comfy; better than the one in here.”

“Guess I’ll head home, then,” Ryuji said, and with a quick goodbye, was hurrying down the alley. It felt like he was running away; Futaba, tucking her hands in her pockets, just stared as he went.

Yuuki thought he knew her moods, but this was definitely a different Futaba. She hung her head low on the walk back to Boss’s house and didn’t seem inclined to talk about anything at all, when usually she’d chatter away at a mile a minute, never stopping for breath.

But that was Futaba before the school term. Yuuki had a feeling she was dumbing it all down to fit in better, holding all that manic energy inside to keep from creeping her classmates out, and he had to wonder when she was going to explode.

He didn’t want her to. He might not like being called an NPC all the time, but it was better than nothing, and Futaba only saved names for the people she really cared about. Yuuki might be her friend, but he didn’t seem to be up there—and just because he was mildly miffed about it didn’t mean he had to be a jerk.

These things took time. Futaba just needed more of it.

Still, though; he knocked his hand against hers, still shoved into her jacket. When she looked up at him her glasses reflected light from the grocery store, but in the next instant was gone. He couldn’t see much there even through the shadow he was casting, but he thought he saw loneliness, and something deeper and darker.

So he did it again, letting his hand linger. An invitation, a short one, with Boss’s back to them and Yongen-jaya’s streets dimly lit by storefronts. No one would have to know; no one would have to see, and if it made her feel a little better by the time they got to the house, all the better.

She shook her head but rammed herself into his side, nearly knocking him off his feet. Contradictory, but Yuuki knew it well enough not to mind it.

_I want it, but I don’t want to ask. I want it, but people will stare. I want it, but no one wants to give it to me. I want it, but I don’t deserve it._

Boss, if he noticed, didn’t say a word.

* * *

Shinya lay on his bed, feet kicking air, determined not to look too much at his character on the screen of his phone, her bright pink hair flashing and whirling. It turned out he couldn’t dye it a different color, and it turned out he couldn’t start the game over again, either, which was seriously such a shitty design scheme he was tempted to write a very angry letter to the publishers.

But the game didn’t have any. He had tried looking it up but came up with nothing but a bunch of forum posts somewhere, asking if the game was a virus. No one knew where it came from, and no one knew who had made it, so for now his angry letter was sitting in his desk drawer as he glared at the screen.

Pink Girl was getting stronger, even though it was getting harder for him to grind for EXP; maybe if he actually started doing those quests that Jill lady had asked him to do, he’d unlock a new area with tougher monsters. Fighting fairies all the time was getting boring.

He huffed, blowing hair out of his eyes. Maybe he should pick up a headband with his Gun About winnings next week—but if he did that, the teachers at school would whine that he should have just gotten it cut, like they kept telling him to.

Ordering, more like, as if they were the ones in charge, as if he couldn’t beat their asses at Gun About: _“Oda, cut that damn hair!”_

It wasn’t fair. He thought he picked a school with some lax hair policies—not like some other schools, where he’d heard of teachers bringing in black hair dye and forcing it onto students—but it turned out it was just the same as everywhere else after all. His hair was too long, and apparently that made all of the other students uncomfortable, which was stupid.

What the hell were they doing, staring at his hair? Why couldn’t they mind their own business, instead of whining about it? Didn’t they know who they were talking to?

Shinya clicked his tongue. Onscreen, Pink Girl did some flashy finishing move, wiping out a slew of enemies all at once before posing with a peace sign.

A Rank, again. As if he couldn’t do better.

Maybe he’d go start one of those quests after all. He could power up Pink Girl with some items, too, even if he didn’t like all the mumbo-jumbo science-y shit the characters liked talking about with each other while they made them. He didn’t get half the terms, and online searches kept proving fruitless.

But, whatever. He didn’t need to understand what everything did; he could equip it, go test it out, and then keep it on if it worked. That was how he got so good at Gun About: lots and lots of trial and error.

So he skipped all the boring dialogue from Jill, got sent out on a mission, and spent most of the night fighting enemies in the new area until he was strong enough to trample the boss.

It was still no Gun About, but it still felt good to win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I know nothing about pornography laws in Japan, so let's just pretend eighteen-year-olds can buy it and leave it at that


	3. Golden Week, Part Two

The thing about Yusuke’s phone was that he couldn’t avoid it forever. He wanted to, but there were too many things tied to it: his connection to his friends, his connection to Akira, his train pass…

He couldn’t help Akira without seeing notifications from Yuuki. He couldn’t travel to the park or his part-time job at the florist’s in Shibuya’s underground mall without seeing notifications from Ryuji. He couldn’t sit in front of his canvas, struggling just to raise his brush without seeing notifications from Futaba.

He could cook dinner without it, though. Tonight was something simple and traditional he thought he could make, but he’d burnt the fish and the soup and Nakanohara was struggling to swallow.

He was, too. Years of eating whatever he could get his hands on hadn’t left him much room to be picky, and the burnt parts weren’t thick enough to be completely inedible, even though they both knew the taste would linger like the foul stench in the air.

“Forgive me,” Yusuke said, going back for another helping of rice. It didn’t do much to wash out the taste, but it seemed to dilute it. He felt rather full already, just on the rice alone. “I didn’t realize I was such a poor chef.”

“No one gets it right the first time, Yusuke, or any number of times after that,” Nakanohara said. “It’s fine. I’m surprised it’s as edible as it is, honestly. Madarame didn’t teach anyone to cook, and I don’t recall anyone teaching you.”

“I took a few classes at the center. Cooking is far more complex than I thought it to be.”

Nakanohara only hummed through a mouthful of soup, grimacing as it went down.

They worked their way through dinner and an entire cooker of rice, far more than they’d ever eaten before. Yusuke’s stomach felt fit to burst after, even though he wanted something else to cleanse his palate. Nakanohara didn’t even make tea after the dishes were washed, heading back out the door on some last-minute errands.

That was fine with Yusuke. He locked the door, grabbed a can of potato sticks, and headed back to his room and the easel and his phone, with dozens of messages from his friends awaiting him. He was wanted—not for the first time in his life, but it still amazed him every day—and it felt very strange.

When he had lived with Madarame, the only thing he had wanted for was time and space to paint. Madarame had told him that his peers would be jealous of him for being under the tutelage of someone so famous in the art world; he had been told to watch out for those who would approach him with smiles and talk of friendship only to turn around and use him as their own foot in the door, and Yusuke had believed it, shunning everyone who tried to get close, citing his need to work as an excuse to ignore how nervous the exchange made him, and how it made him yearn for the ease with which his peers talked with one another.

Eventually, no one talked to him unless they were forced to. Even in the atelier, no one talked to him—not as much as he would have liked—all because he was too young to understand their problems.

But now he was wanted. Yusuke had people who actively sought him out for casual chats or serious talks or just to get his opinion. He had an employer who didn’t mind how seriously he took arrangements or how extravagant his actions could be when the urge took hold. He had a guardian who fed him and made sure the clothes he was wearing weren’t falling apart and actually fit, though Yusuke hadn’t bothered to go through most of the new wardrobe Nakanohara had helped him buy. He had more outfits than days of the week, now.

It was all very, very strange.

He glanced at his easel, where the blank canvas had snatches of lines running across it. He didn’t know yet what kind of painting it was going to be, just that he didn’t want anyone to see it, ever. Perhaps he would burn it when he was done, just to be sure, but until then it was his to battle with.

His phone pinged, and he jumped, his snacks rattling in his hands. He wasn’t even sure why he’d brought the can with him, but set it down next to his easel and dared a glance at his phone.

Mishima: **Are you feeling alright? If you’re sick you should say so**

Yusuke certainly felt sick, but that was partly the food and partly the way his heart leaped at the sight of Yuuki’s name. He looked to his sketchbooks, sitting innocently on a shelf and yet filled with more drawings of one person than he could comprehend.

He should move them, just in case.

 **I’m quite well, actually,** he lied, **just busier than I expected to be.**

Because it was easier to lie and say he was busy than to admit he had been contemplating thrusting a palette knife through his canvas. Because it was easier to lie and say he was well enough when just Yuuki’s name on his phone made his knees weak and his hands begin to tremble.

Mishima: **You’re taking care of yourself, though, right?**

Of course he was. Of _course_ he was. If Yuuki could withstand the despair of being unable to be with the one he loved, so could Yusuke. If Yuuki could grin and bear it, so could Yusuke.

He sent an affirmative, then checked back through his messages. Yuuki wanted his help with something—not right away, so it could wait if Yusuke was busy—but he’d like an expert opinion. As Yusuke read Yuuki sent over the same request, just in case he forgot, and Yusuke ran out of excuses.

He wound up promising to meet with him tomorrow, at the park, where Yusuke knew of a few good spots where they could talk without being overheard or seen by too many people. If it was a project, Yuuki likely wouldn’t want anyone else to see it, even by accident, until he thought it was ready.

Yusuke knew the feeling too well. He glanced at his canvas and buried his head in his hands, heedless to the oil streaking across his phone screen.

Life, he decided, was unfair.

Life—as so many people including Madarame, Nakanohara, and several teachers, friends, and acquaintances throughout the years had told him—was unfair.

That didn’t mean he had to be cruel and unkind right back. Bad things happened to good people; that didn’t have to mean that they turned around and did awful things themselves.

But Yusuke was close to it. Something horrible and ugly was welling up inside of him, and it did not feel much like love—or much like nausea. His stomach churned.

He eyed his canvas. Already, it was ugly, becoming a thing he never wanted anyone in the world to see. He barely wanted to see it; he definitely did not want Nakanohara or Yuuki or any one of his friends to see it.

But the best way to deal with emotions, he had learned, was to put them to paper or canvas. Immortalize them in ink and paint, charcoal and watercolor—and then destroy it, lest Madarame got a hold of it and decided he liked it enough to take it away.

One shaking hand went to his brush and palette; the other set his phone on the floor and scooped up tubes of paint: red, black, brown.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

* * *

If the next day Yusuke looked as if he had spent yet another sleepless night in front of his canvas, Nakanohara said not a word. He got ready for the day, ate breakfast, then left the apartment with Nakanohara, the other man on his way to his job. They parted at the train station. His old _senpai_ made him promise to eat lunch, and he thought of the rice balls in his bag, surely with a bit of paint mixed in somewhere and agreed.

After that, he only needed to wait for Yuuki.

Ordinarily, Yusuke liked wandering the park amidst the crowds until he found a good spot to people-watch from; he liked to get there early and spend hours by the playground or the lake, sketching when he wanted to and just looking at the ease with which everyone took their unburdened lives for granted. How nice it must be to have parents who took their children to the park and bought them ice cream or ramen afterwards. How nice it must be to have siblings who stuck up for you against playground bullies, and ones who wanted to play with each other. Even the couples who argued the whole time they were within earshot were more blessed than Yusuke, because they, at least, had had the courage to admit what he could not.

He glanced down at his bag. Nestled at the bottom underneath the rice balls and his sketching supplies was his phone, innocent and waiting. He’d helped Akira a bit on the train ride here and felt the pull of the distraction like a magnet; it would certainly pass the time, but there were two things wrong with that.

One: he still didn’t want Yuuki—or any of the others—to know just yet. It was one of the things that made his heart ugly, to want Yuuki to want to spend time with him without worrying over when he would ask about Akira. To want Yuuki to focus on him, just for that short bit of time. To want his attention.

Two: Akira himself had made no mention of Yuuki… at all. He had not alluded to help from another living being on Earth besides Yusuke in the month Yusuke had been helping him, and he certainly acted as if the past three years had never happened. Something on Akira’s end had gone wrong—perhaps it was the way Yuuki forced him to sever the connection—and Yusuke hated the conflicting emotions that rose up whenever he thought of it: that if Akira had truly given up on Yuuki, Yusuke could finally act; that Yusuke didn’t want to see Yuuki’s face when he was told that Akira didn’t want a thing to do with him anymore, didn’t want to hear that the only man Yuuki could love was a boy in another dimension who no longer wanted him.

Elation and misery.

Two sides of a coin.

Yusuke found his spot, sent Yuuki a text to let him know where he was, and sat on the grass, heedless to the stains forming on his pants. There were already paint splatters on most of his clothes, a few more stains wouldn’t hurt.

He dug out his sketchbook and a pencil, opened up to the most recent page, and stared. Akira stared back, all fierceness and pain, hands tugging at his hair as he thought about the lives of the citizens living on the colony ship Soreil, spent drifting endlessly through space. How they lived in fear of the Sharl, beings Akira and Yuuki had created together. How no one trusted Akira, despite his once being the Emperor. His hands hid scars Yuuki had never mentioned and likely never saw—Akira’s chest was a latticework of abuse, thick and thin, raised and not. It formed a delicate tracery of lines Yusuke could only liken to stained glass, if he had the gall to color it so.

He did not.

The scars traveled everywhere: up and down Akira’s arms, across the surface of his stomach, down to his toes and across the backs of his hands. It was worst on his chest, though, and Yusuke feared for the only other area Akira had kept covered in the bath as they did their ceremony. It would not be right to speculate, but it could not be right to torture one boy so thoroughly, and Yusuke had winced at the implications, seeing scars travel below the waistband of Akira’s trunks.

And those were just the physical ones. The people of that world had only barely scarred his face, but there were scars behind Akira’s eyes, too. Yusuke could see them now, now that Akira couldn’t hide in a make-believe world anymore.

Worse, Yusuke could interact with those scars, and in turn they gave Akira power. He didn’t even seem to care that a stranger was delving into the world inside of his heart, as long as he became stronger. The better to fight for what was right and to protect his friends and former citizens, he said, but that wasn’t true.

It couldn’t be true. Yusuke refused to believe it—he had, after all, been one of the ones privy to how much Yuuki and Akira cared for each other, how much it had torn them both apart to take this chance.

Akira, he was convinced, was only hiding it. If that was the case then it was a very simply matter: Yusuke would have to win over his trust, become his friend, and find what corner of his heart the other boy had locked Yuuki and that lovesick Akira into. They had to be there, somewhere.

Somewhere.

He flipped to a different page and drew a couple picnicking across the path, their expressions and the food obscured by the shade of the tree they sat under. It was all dark and speculative, although if he squinted he thought he saw rolled omelets and a salad and the woman laughing, blushing, brushing her hair behind her ear. He thought he saw love in her partner’s eyes.

He snapped his sketchbook closed. If he thought of love, he would inevitably think of Yuuki, and those thoughts led down a path he wasn’t ready to traverse. Not as he was then, waking in the morning to find his thighs sticky and his sheets stained and the ghost of Yuuki’s voice still drifting into his ear, calling his name over and over—

“Yusuke! Geez, you are way out of it.”

Yusuke looked up, startled. Yuuki stared back, a slight furrow to his brow, his lips twisted into a frown. Yusuke couldn’t stand to see him that way, not when he deserved all of the happiness the world could give him.

(As if Yusuke could talk, keeping happiness from him intentionally.)

“Apologies,” Yusuke said, as Yuuki carefully put the bag slung over his shoulder down, then flopped to the dirt beside him with a sigh.

“No, it’s fine,” Yuuki said. “You’ve been busy. All of us’ve been busy.”

“Yes, well, we both know how my thoughts tend to wander. I feel rather guilty for forgetting to return your messages.”

“You’ve been busy,” Yuuki said again, and bumped Yusuke’s arm with his elbow. The spot where their skin touched burned long after, like a brand. “We’ve all been busy. Don’t worry about it.”

Yusuke swallowed. “Right. What—ah, what was it you wanted to show me?”

Yuuki flushed, suddenly more interested in his shoelaces or the couple across the path than in Yusuke. Yusuke watched him fiddle with the rings on his necklace, hidden under his shirt.

They would look better on his fingers than on a necklace, but that was Yusuke’s opinion, and Yusuke feared to ever voice it. Yuuki wouldn’t wear them properly until Akira returned; he’d made that perfectly clear at the sleepover, in the early hours of the morning when sleeplessness had made them all giddy and silly and prone to saying the things they normally wouldn’t, as if drunk on the feeling of sleep deprivation. Yusuke wondered, sometimes, if Ryuji or Futaba remembered the things Yuuki had whispered into the gloom of the attic.

It was likely. It was also likely they were all just pretending not to have heard, to spare him the embarrassment.

Yuuki reached for his bag, dragging it close to withdraw a laptop. “One of the classes I have to take this semester is website design,” he explained, flipping it open. The desktop background was rather plain; Yusuke wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting—a picture of Akira, in his wedding ensemble? A slideshow of all the photos of Akira Yuuki had?—but it certainly wasn’t a sheet of solid color, so much as to hurt the eye.

Perhaps it was meant to be unassuming. It had taken Yuuki so much courage just to talk about Akira at first. Perhaps he wanted some time before he shoved a boy onto his laptop screen, where anyone could see.

Yusuke would certainly want time.

“And I, uh,” Yuuki continued, “kind of wanted an opinion on the design of it. Part of me thinks it’s fine, but part of me thinks it’s too much, so…”

“So you wanted an artist’s opinion on the design,” Yusuke said, more to himself than back to Yuuki, who only nodded. He was waiting for a webpage to load, and tapped a finger on his keyboard as it did.

“Have you been doing okay? You’ve been eating, right?” Yuuki asked. The park’s wi-fi was never very good, and even worse away from the park’s center and the entrances, and the loading bar crawled at a pace Yusuke believed to be slower than a snail. It was no wonder Yuuki wanted to make small talk to pass the time, even if these were questions Yusuke had already answered.

“I’ve been having some trouble sleeping,” Yusuke responded, “but not to worry: Nakanohara makes sure I eat at least twice a day. What I do for lunch is up to me, but we do have breakfast and dinner together. It’s nice. Different. I don’t recall Madarame ever eating meals with us; perhaps it was to hide his distaste for our meager portions.”

“Was he really that bad?”

The white was burning into his eyes; he focused, instead, on the way Yuuki’s profile looked from this angle. The curve of his ear, the line of his hair, the gentle slope of his cheek. Yusuke’s fingers ached for his pencil, set off to the side with his sketchbook—this was exactly the sort of thing Madarame never let see the light of day. If he were still around, Yusuke would have been allowed to keep it, if it wasn’t torn to shreds first.

“Not on the surface,” Yusuke said. “He was quite old. He had a way about him to make you feel guilty if you didn’t give him what he wanted. He made you think you were doing it because you wanted to, and not because he was making you.”

(“I’m sorry, Yusuke,” Madarame had sighed. He had looked awful: hair askew, bags under his eyes, the slightest hint of stubble on his chin. “These latest pieces, they’re all so terrible. Who in their right mind would ever want them to hang in their home?”

And, as he’d started to cry, Yusuke had said, “You can have another of mine, Sensei. I don’t mind.”

Because if Madarame hadn’t had pieces to sell, it meant another week or month living off of scraps. Salt and water. Yusuke had wanted— _needed_ —food, and a new set of clothes to replace the ones he was growing out of, and more art supplies. He would never have minded if the supplies came last—he would draw with cheap pens and pencils on newspapers if he had to, although it never came to that—but he wanted clothes that fit him correctly, and he wanted to live to keep drawing. The dead could not create.)

“He never hurt you?” Yuuki asked, softly. A breeze could have sucked the words away, but they were protected by a large climbing rock on one side and the tree on another.

Yusuke thought of all the things Madarame had taken from him: his mother and her love, a warm home, the assurance of food on the table more than once a day. His paintings. The recognition Yusuke had deserved for painting them. The money he should have earned rightfully that was still being funneled into a special account Yusuke didn’t want to touch. Friends.

But Madarame had never made him give up anything. If Yusuke had brought over his classmates, he had been sure they would have been appalled at his home, squalid and squat in the middle of Tokyo. The electricity had barely worked; the bath never got a degree above lukewarm; the heating and air conditioning cut out most days. It was clean but paint was everywhere. It was clean but painting supplies was all there was. It was clean, but it was bare, just like Yusuke had been.

“Not physically,” he said, and watched Yuuki’s shoulders slump in relief. The sight made him wonder what it was like to live in fear of the next strike, the next hit. What it would be like to learn not to flinch whenever someone raised their hand or their voice.

Akira had nerves of steel in that regard. He faced down hoards of enemies on a near-daily basis. He had fought his friends, trying to get them to understand him. Whatever horrors he had gone through, he was very good at hiding it.

( _“Think of it as a QA test,”_ said the robot in Akira’s mind. _“And don’t worry—even if you fail, we’ll make sure to recycle every last bit of you!”_ )

“But,” Yusuke added, “there are more ways to hurt someone than physically doing so.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said. “I know.”

The webpage loaded at last. Yusuke would readily admit to knowing next to nothing about computers, or the Internet, and wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking at.

“It’s going to be a forum when I’m done,” Yuuki said, clicking several sections on the page. **TEST POST** , most of them said. “But—I guess I just want to be sure it’s—you know, not too hard on the eye or something?”

“It seems fine to me,” Yusuke said. A cream-colored background, stark black text on the top. Rather dull, but if all it was going to be was a place where people could gather to chat, he supposed it didn’t matter. He said as much, and Yuuki nodded again.

“Like I said, I just wanted to be sure,” he said, and reached a hand to his necklace. “I didn’t want to tell Futaba about it. I thought she’d laugh at the code or something and then hack it, honestly.”

“It’s just a school project, isn’t it?”

“At first it was.” He clicked around some more. There was a part of the site that explained what it was for; all Yusuke got was a glimpse of text that said _Ciel_ _a_ and that was all he needed.

But Yuuki kept explaining anyway: “Futaba said I could make something to help the people who might be helping Akira. I don’t know how much is going to be explained to them, and I can’t even say how much I remember for sure, but I thought I could at least give them a place to talk to each other, if there’s more than one. I—I think I’d like to think I’m still helping him in a roundabout kind of way. Is that dumb?”

“No,” Yusuke said, though his stomach began to clench again. “He means so much to you that you can’t simply sit back and wait for him to return. He means so much to you that you created this to help him. The recognition can’t all be yours, but you’ll always have his heart in the end.”

Yuuki smiled, and touched his rings again. Yusuke’s heart nearly broke in two at the gesture, at the look. That look would never be turned his way; that smile, on those lips, would never be his to claim. Yusuke would never be the one to run his hands through Yuuki’s hair. He would never be the one to discover all of the colors that blended together to make up Yuuki’s eyes.

Then Yuuki laughed, a short huff of air. “I don’t think I even care if people laugh at how simple it is. If it helps them bring him home, Yusuke, I don’t care if it looks like a toddler made it. Is _that_ dumb?”

“Quite,” Yusuke said. “A toddler doesn’t have the knowledge or skill to create a website all on their own. Call it amateurish instead, please.”

Yuuki laughed again, and tilted his head back. He was grinning almost ear to ear, a grin that showed off his teeth and scrunched up his eyes, and the angle bared the line of his throat. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” Yusuke said, inwardly cursing that no matter how he felt, his voice was always flat, lacking the subtle inflections any other person’s would have. It did not shake or tremble or get stuck in his throat to crack on the syllables.

With a voice like his—with a body trained to lack the typical reactions—how would anyone ever know he was a man in love?

* * *

Shinya wasn’t sure what had possessed him to come to the park. He’d gotten tired of sitting around at home, and his Golden Week allowance was gone within two days, every yen spent playing Gun About in Akihabara, which was more packed than usual due to the holiday. He’d won a day’s worth of extra rounds betting with losers, but today he didn’t even have that to eat up his time.

Not that he was getting tired of fighting losers all the time. He wanted to win, but he wanted it to be a near thing—a challenge. He wanted to prove that he could come out of a potentially losing situation the victor.

He flopped down on top of a large climbing rock and let the heat of it soak into him. The sun was high in the sky. He should have felt baked; instead he just felt tired.

It was his hair, and all the assholes at school who wouldn’t play games with him during lunch anymore. It wasn’t his fault they always lost no matter how badly he tried to give them the occasional game, and it wasn’t his fault they always wanted to play poker and bet. It definitely wasn’t his fault that they were sore losers, and his winning streak had nothing to do with the fact that he kept having to brush his hair out of his face.

“Just cut it, Oda,” they always said.

“I’ll cut it if you win,” he always sniped back, and of course, he never lost. Shinya Oda didn’t lose bets or games of any kind. Shinya Oda couldn’t lose bets or games of any kind, not against losers who were easy to read and too dumb to know he was giving them the upper hand.

He had to win, and he had to keep winning. His mom didn’t like losers. She’d stop giving him an allowance if he ever lost, and then someone would steal his spot as the King of the arcade.

Down below there was laughter. Kids running around, their parents calling for them. Squeals of happiness and the thud of footsteps and a cloud passed over the sun, blocking out its light.

He opened his eyes. Not a cloud. “Hey, Oda,” said one of the losers he always bet with.

“What,” he said.

“Aw, don’t be like that,” said another. They grinned down at him, their teeth shiny in the shadows. A third one held up a pack of cards and waved it.

“We thought about inviting ya to play with us,” said the third, “but if you’re too busy doing girly shit like tanning we’ll find somebody else.”

“I wasn’t tanning,” Shinya said. He sat up; the second guy knocked him back down, and all three of them laughed as his hat went flying over the edge of the rock. Someone down below exclaimed at it.

He hoped they caught it.

“Course you weren’t, Oda,” said the first. Shinya didn’t like the way he said his name; he tried again to sit up, but the second guy pushed him back down and held him there. “Here’s a game for ya, Oda; you escape, and we don’t cut your girly-ass hair. How’s that sound?”

“Like fucking shit,” he snarled. “Get off of me—”

Second shoved a hand over his mouth. All that escaped were muffled expletives.

“What’s that, Oda?” said Third, loudly enough that it had to carry to the bottom of the rock, where whoever had caught his hat was probably still standing around, puzzling out where it had come from. “You feeling sick? Gonna barf? We’ll help you to the bathroom, okay?”

They hauled him upright and down the rock, First and Second’s arms around his shoulders, his own in locks that felt like they were designed to rip them off. Third glanced back on occasion, as if concerned, but grinned when he knew no one was looking.

Shinya bit Second’s fingers. All he got was a hiss of breath sucked between Second’s teeth and a twist to his shoulder.

They had to pass dozens of people to get to the public bathroom, but either no one was paying much attention to a bunch of boys or no one cared about a bunch of boys dragging another off, one of them telling him loudly to hold it all in until they got there.

 _What the hell_ , Shinya thought. Wasn’t it obvious what was going on? Why wasn’t anyone trying to _help_ him?

The public bathroom was cooler than it was outside and empty. Their shoes scuffed across linoleum; their clothes rustled. The door shut behind them like a nail in a coffin.

He was dragged into the handicapped stall. Third latched the door behind them, then dug around in his pockets. Second started laughing; Shinya bit him again. It did nothing except earn him a swift kick to the shin.

“Fucking hell, Oda,” Third said, and under the lights the scissors in his hand glinted. “You can’t really think you coulda kept acting like a hotshot.”

“Girly hotshot,” Second said, and shook Shinya’s head. His hair flew. “It even smells girly. You use your mommy’s shampoo, Oda, or do you buy it on your own?”

Shinya bit him again. This time Second cursed and his hand jerked away—Shinya took a deep breath, prepared to scream—

And First gagged him with a handkerchief rolled up into a ball, and shoved his hand over the top of it. Second nursed his hand, glaring at him. Third only stared, his grin fallen away, the scissors in his hand opening and shutting with little snicking sounds.

“Come on, Oda,” he said. “I don’t wanna take your ear off on accident, but I will. With all the money you won from us you coulda afforded a good stylist or something, but now we gotta do it ourselves, you know? It’s your own fault.”

 _Fuck you_ , he thought. _Fuck you. And fuck whichever shitty teacher thought they could pay you to do it, too._

First had his arms pinned with an arm across his chest. The most he could do was kick Third away until Second got over his bite and manhandled Shinya’s legs together. He could tell they were struggling to hold him, but not much; blind rage had a way of dulling the pain and easing the aches they would otherwise be developing.

Shinya wasn’t stupid. The second he’d flopped down on that rock and forgot his surroundings, he’d lost. He should have known better, should have just spent the day at home looking up Gun About strategies on YouCubed.

Shinya wasn’t stupid. He knew life was shit, sometimes. He knew life was shit most of the time, and that the only thing that mattered was that he won.

He just never imagined that he would lose like this.

Third crept closer. Shinya glared at him, refusing to shut his eyes and pretend this wasn’t happening.

The stall door burst open. It clipped Third on the back of his head, making him squawk with surprise, then slammed into the wall. On the other side of the door was a man who glared at them all.

“As I thought,” he said, and his voice rumbled through the bathroom.

“Who the hell are you?” Third yelled, whirling around. Shinya would have thought the line cliché, but he wanted to know himself.

Who the hell was this guy, who thought he could interrupt when Shinya was so obviously losing? Who the hell was this guy, who thought he could save Shinya like he was some damsel in distress?

“Concerned,” said the guy, and reached forward and wrestled the scissors out of Third’s hands.

“Fuck you,” said Third, gasping as his fingers were jammed one way and then the other until he was forced to let go.

The guy pocketed them. He was so tall they had to crane their necks to look up at him, and the lights in the bathroom cast his face into shadows so ominous he could have been a final boss.

(His hair was long, Shinya noted. It brushed his shoulders and framed him in a halo of blue light, like some kind of fucking mermaid prince. What the fuck. So _this_ guy could have long hair without anybody harassing him about it, but Shinya couldn’t?)

“Let him go and leave,” said the guy. He moved out of the way just enough for a person to squeeze through.

Third spat at him. “Fuck you,” he snarled. “This ain’t your business, asshole. Get lost.”

“You can’t fight them,” said someone else out by the sinks. “They’re just kids.”

“Rotten kids,” the guy said. His eyes narrowed. “Kids who know nothing except that they’ve been wronged and must have vengeance. Kids who think that by bullying and forcing others to their will that they will have gained the respect they so deserve. What a shame that they’re rotten to the core.”

Third flew at the guy, screaming. His blind punch flew wide—or maybe the guy had just dodged it, barely stepping out of the way—before he tripped and fell flat to the floor, his nose crunching as it met linoleum, his head cracking.

“Shit,” said the other guy, wherever he was.

“Let him go,” said the guy again. “Take your friend and leave, and perhaps rethink your gambling habits. You had the choice not to. You’ve no right to be upset by the outcome.”

“Fuck you,” said First, but he shoved Shinya away. He would have fallen straight to the floor, too, if the guy hadn’t caught him.

Second pinched the inside of his thigh through his jeans before letting go. He and First hauled Third off the floor, and the group of them shuffled awkwardly out of the toilet.

Shinya thought he heard a camera shutter going off. He couldn’t confirm it because he’d spat out first’s handkerchief and was yelling. “Who the hell do you think you are, getting in the way like that, huh? Do I look like some stupid kid who needs saving to you?”

He shoved the guy away. The guy blinked and said, “Unprofessional haircuts, while cheap, are often rather unbecoming. There is a reason men and women _learn_ to cut hair, you know.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means,” said the other guy, peering into the stall. He looked meek. Squeamish. His skin was stupidly pale despite the flush to his cheeks, like he was going to be sick.

“I didn’t need you to save me!” Shinya yelled, ignoring the other guy. “I lost, and that was my punishment for losing! That’s what happens to losers who aren’t strong enough to win!”

The losers get trampled on. Beaten. In the old days, they would lose food, clothing, shelter, dignity. Nowadays they just lost the money they needed to live, which wasn’t much better, but Shinya didn’t give a shit. He won his bets and his games fair and square—

“You lost,” said the guy, “but was it a fair loss? Can you call it fair if they tie you down and force you to lose?”

Of course it wasn’t. But— “That’s what happens when you’re not strong enough to win,” he said again, wishing it got through this guy’s thick skull. Why didn’t he understand that there was more than one way to win or lose? Why didn’t he understand that Shinya could win all the games he wanted if he lost the second he went into the classroom and found his desk filled with trash?

The guy sighed and breathed in deep like he was about to lecture. The other guy tugged on his sleeve and said, “Don’t push it, Yusuke. He’s got to figure it out on his own. It just works like that sometimes.”

 _Fucking finally_ , Shinya thought, as the guy backed down with a furrow to his brow and a purse to his lips. So fucking what if he wanted to lecture Shinya all damn day? Other guy clearly wasn’t about to let him.

But _figure it out on his own_? What the fuck did that mean?

“We’ll, um,” said the other guy, tugging at his friend’s sleeve. The guy didn’t want to move—he kept looking at Shinya like he was actually going to sit him down and lecture until the sun set—but let the other guy tug him out of the stall, and Shinya scowled back until both of them were out of sight. “We’ll just go. Will you be okay getting home?”

“Fuck off,” Shinya said.

“How rude,” said the guy, sounding like he was trying to turn around.

The other guy hushed him with a quiet, “Just leave it. He doesn’t want help. We can’t make him want help, Yusuke.”

“But that’s—” the guy started to protest, but was cut off by the door swinging shut. Shinya didn’t know what he was going to say and didn’t care.

He was too busy trying to not cry.

Crying would mean he really lost. Crying would mean he was as much of a loser as those classmates of his wanted him to be. Crying would mean his eyes would swell up, and then his mom would see, and she’d call the school and scream at them over the phone for hours until she got her way and all of his classmates got the idea that he was a _complete loser_ who needed his mom to fight his battles for him.

So he sucked in one harsh breath. Two. Three. Each one shook with the promise of a sob, but each one held. The burning in his eyes gradually subsided. His hands finally unclenched.

He flushed First’s handkerchief down the toilet, washed his hands and face, and went home.

* * *

Ryuji sighed down at his plate. His plate, fortunately, didn’t sigh back—but his ma, sitting at the table with her checkbook and bank statements spread out, clearly heard it anyway over the sound of the bubbles hissing in the sink.

“You alright, Ryu?” she asked.

Ryuji grunted. He’d thought he was fine, but what happened the other day at Futaba’s and then at Leblanc was still eating at him. He’d thought about talking it out with Ann or Suzui, but they had enough problems of their own to worry about without him adding to the pile.

His ma might understand, but he didn’t want to bother her while she was budgeting. “It’s nothing big, Ma, don’t worry about it,” he said, but still heard her set down her pen and get up.

“It’s gotta be big if it’s got ya sighing about it,” she said, and ran her hand over his shoulders as she passed him to the kettle.

Tea. Of course. His ma had a saying that there was nothing a good cup of tea and a good chat couldn’t fix, and they’d worked out almost everything major in their lives together like that: over tea and crackers or cookies, or the stale snacks about to be thrown out by her bosses. They’d laugh over chocolate-covered cardboard breaking apart under their teeth until Ryuji started talking or his ma started wondering—should he take that extra class this semester, should she try for that promotion—and now wasn’t any different, even though dinner was still settling.

So he spent the time in between his last dish and her brewing to think it over. He’d never been good with words, but his ma let him have as much time as he needed to come up with them. His ma didn’t get offended when he stopped talking abruptly, or when he started up again minutes later with a topic they’d touched on last week.

The only problem was that he needed to frame it around the lie he’d spun: that Yuuki was dating a stranger from the ‘net, and that they’d never met in person.

(Had there been anything else? Did he say Akira was sick, or just that they lived far apart?)

And there was no way he could mention the rings. None at all, not when money was tight and he was barely making tuition with his part-time job. Definitely not when Futaba, of all people, had already called him out on it.

Ryuji groaned down into the sink, covered in suds. He peeled his gloves off—if there was anything Boss needed to invest in, it was a pair or two of good cleaning gloves—and then flopped down into a chair as his ma sat the tea down. She raised her brows and took a sip; he stared into his cup as if the dregs could divine his future like in that one movie, the one about the boy whose dog had gone to jail. He couldn’t remember the name of it, but he did still remember the part where the kid finished his cup and then hallucinated animal control busting down his door.

That movie was weird.

His ma stared and stared; he took a crumbly, probably-stale cookie and bit into it.

Yep, stale.

“Ma,” he said at last, when the silence had gotten heavy and uncomfortable, “you—you like my friends, right?”

“They all seemed like good people to me,” she said. “And they’re your friends. Why wouldn’t I like them?”

“I dunno.” He sipped his tea, grimaced at the taste, and added sugar. Lots of sugar. “I just—lately I kinda feel like I’m not, you know, being a good friend to them. They get weird on me sometimes, and sometimes I can bring ‘em out of it, and sometimes I can’t.”

“Oh, Ryuji,” she said. She must have known what he meant to say—that sometimes Yuuki got down in the dumps but an arm slung across his shoulder and an ear for him to worry incessantly into got him out; that sometimes (okay, so far it was just the once) Futaba just shut down on him in the middle of a conversation and no matter what he did Ryuji just seemed to make it worse—because his ma was looking at him the way she had when he’d finally admitted to how goddamn awful he still felt, months later, that he’d lost his scholarship to Shujin over a shitty coach, costing his mom hundreds of thousands of yen in tuition payments, yen that could have been going to anything else.

“And it, you know,” he kept going, as she reached for a cookie, “makes me feel like they’re gonna leave me again, like the track team did. Like I’m not what they need, or what they want—you know?”

When Takeishi and the guys from the former track team had ignored him on his return to school, that had stung. The longer it went, the more it hurt, and the more pissed he got. He remembered tracking them down, his leg still in a cast, and screaming at them to _tell_ him if they didn’t want anything to do with him anymore.

And they had, and that had hurt, too. Stung like something in him was breaking again, but Ryuji hadn’t been able to tell what. If he was a sap, he would have said it was his heart.

But Ryuji was his dad’s kid. He could hear the beer bottles breaking already, could hear the way Yuuki had fallen to the floor that afternoon only a year ago, now, after tripping over his own chair. Ryuji had done that—caused it—and he hadn’t even asked if Yuuki was okay after.

He’d been too busy getting the hell out of that apartment, stolen phone burning a hole in his pocket, his thighs aching like they’d bruise. He’d been too busy getting back to Futaba, because Futaba had been one of only four or five people in the whole damn city who wanted him around, even if it was for petty theft.

“But they haven’t left you, have they?” his ma asked.

“No,” he said. “That’s what it feels like they’re gonna do, though. Leave me.”

Because he was too stupid to figure this shit out on his own. Because he was too self-absorbed to think about what he said all the time. Because he didn’t have to deal with the same woe-is-me attitude that their heads seemed to be stuck in half the time.

His ma hummed around a bite. The chocolate made the cookies nearly-edible, as opposed to outright inedible, and he reached for another. He stared at it for a long time as she ate and thought and eventually said, “I don’t want ‘em to leave me. I don’t want to be alone like that, Ma.”

“Ryuji, dear, no one does,” she said, and reached across the table to grip his hand. “Even I’ve got a handful of good friends I can rely on when I need to. But we don’t always get to see each other; that’s part of growing up. In—in your case, with your friends, they might only need reminders that you’re here for them every so often. Sometimes that’s all someone needs.”

“I know we aren’t gonna be close forever,” he said, “but I just—I can’t show ‘em I’ll be their friend forever if they start pushing me away. What am I supposed to do when they do that?”

Aside from barging into their house, getting pissed off, and stealing their shit.

“You ask if they need some space and give it to them.”

He could feel himself frowning; there was no way it was that easy. There was no way that the key to being a good friend to people like Yuuki and Futaba was just… giving them time and space to be loners who wouldn’t see a scrap of daylight for days if they wanted to. There was no way the key to being a good friend to someone like Yusuke was just… stepping back and letting him do his weird artsy things in the middle of Shibuya.

(Yusuke, in the middle of shopping for a new pair of shoes, had stopped in the middle of the street and framed the skyline, the signs hanging off the buildings a hodge-podge of new and old, faded and bright. Ryuji had tugged him along and off to the side, and he’d grunted and bemoaned the loss of ‘such an inspiring sight,’ and then been mopey for the rest of the trip.)

“That’s it?” he asked, as she took her hand back.

“That’s it,” she said. “And you don’t bombard them with texts, either. One or two a day, to see if they’re alright, because sometimes they’re busy and don’t like looking at a wall of messages to reply to, and because sometimes they don’t feel well and looking at them all makes them feel worse, so they never reply at all.”

Ryuji didn’t understand what would be so bad about waking up to a full wall of messages—that would mean he had people who cared, right?—but Ann had mentioned once at the rehab center that Kamoshida would send her message after message over the weekends, each one asking what she was doing or if she was alone or if she wanted to see him to “hang out.” Asking whether she was bored or not. Telling her he could give her something to do.

“God, it was so creepy,” she had said. “Like I had to spend every waking second with him just because we were dating, even though we both knew I was only doing it so Shiho could stay on the team.”

And then she’d gagged a little, just to show how annoying it was. How fucking desperate Kamoshida had looked to get into a student’s pants. How fucking needy he was acting, how childish it was to think the world revolved around him and his single, solitary, stupid Olympic medal.

So, never mind. Maybe Ryuji _did_ know what would be so bad about waking up to a wall of messages—but he’d never done that. He didn’t want to be told off over text message. He wanted it said straight to his face, so he could watch whoever-it-was not look him in the eye as they did it.

He took a bite of his cookie and washed it down with tea. Too sweet, but it was better than too bitter. His ma hadn’t taken back her hand.

“And then,” she continued, “when you’re back to seeing each other, face-to-face, you tell them how much you care. That you’re there for them. You don’t have to say ‘no matter what’ and you shouldn’t if you don’t mean it, but I know it makes my friends happier to know that I’ve got their backs through anything. _Anything_ , Ryuji.”

Like bad break-ups and divorces and abuse, he thought. Like miscarriages and getting fired and coming out. _Anything_.

“I think I can handle anything,” Ryuji said, and tried to grin. It fell a little flat, and his ma was staring at him as he tried to make it a little more believable. “I dunno if it’ll be the way they want, but I think I can do it.”

His ma patted his hand, then let him go. “And you know if you have trouble with it, you can always come to me.”

This time the grin had no trouble at all. His ma always had his back; that was what was so great about her. She was less a mom half the time, and more a wise, older friend; it might have had something to do with how much Ryuji had grown ever since his dad had left. She’d never had to nag. They’d only had the one fight over college, and while Ryuji could say that he didn’t want to go to keep the burden off of her, he’d been disappointed he wouldn’t have had the chance. She’d seen that, and then she’d insisted he go, and now he was sitting on a debt he was probably going to take half a lifetime repaying.

Life sucked like that sometimes, but he had good people at his side. He could grin and bear it.

“Yeah,” he said, “always.”

* * *

Friday.

The week had gone by so quickly. Too quickly, if Futaba was being honest. Too quickly, because her meds made her sleepy and she conked out for twelve hours at a time now that her alarm wasn’t blaring so early in the morning. Too quickly, because she spent the rest of the time holed up in her room, staring at Kana’s Textter account.

Lots of landscape photos. Pictures of buildings Futaba couldn’t remember the name of because she’d never cared to learn. Lawn ornaments and pets and the river no one had swum in because everyone said it was too polluted to.

Nothing of Kana. She was probably tired of her face being plastered everywhere, anyway, and no re-texts of pretty clothes or shoes or hairstyles that every other girl their age filled their timelines with. Futaba herself re-texted everything Featherman she could find—which was a lot, honestly—and practically everything Yuuki texted, too—which wasn’t much by comparison, but they were bros in the weird picture category. No one else posted pics of nothing but bar codes. No one else posted pics of their cat watching old Featherman reruns.

On her bed, Mona purred and rolled over in his sleep. Monkey-boy hadn’t come back over the past few days, so he’d come out of hiding and was soaking up Futaba’s attention the same way dry, parched dirt soaked up water. The same way Nishima soaked up Akira’s attention, and vice versa.

She tried not to look at the other monitors. Nishima’s website, bare-bones and amateurish, was up on one, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t watching the bot activity and deleting every one before they got his hopes up. On the other was Kana, dressed up in such risque clothes that Futaba knew she was uncomfortable, despite the fact that she was smiling for the camera. They barely hid anything. Even that old model friend of monkey-boy’s would be aghast by them; the industry had standards for teens and high-schoolers, and Kana’s picture wasn’t meeting any of them.

For one thing, Futaba knew Kana wasn’t wearing those clothes willingly—if anyone could actually call them clothes, instead of convenient coverings—and for another, Futaba knew Kana hated it. Every picture, every outfit, every plastered-on smile.

And every single yen those pictures had earned her parents.

Futaba clutched her knees. It was Friday. She wanted to enjoy the weekend loafing around Leblanc’s attic while Nishima worked down in the cafe. She wanted to tell monkey-boy she’d fixed the graphic problems in her latest game. She wanted to bug Inari’s phone to make sure he was actually eating, instead of surviving off of paint water or mushrooms he’d found in the park.

In other words, she wanted to get the message out today. Right now.

But nothing in Kana’s timeline spoke to her.

That was the problem: a little hacking and Futaba could know everything about anyone, up to and including what kind of underwear they liked to buy. A little hacking and she’d found Kana’s Textter account, filled with pictures of mundane, everyday things that barely garnered attention. There was no way to prove that it was Kana’s account, and there was no way to explain how Futaba had found it, either. It was nothing—something normal and boring in a sea of accounts that tried their best to stand out—and so it faded into relative obscurity.

Futaba sighed. She could lie, and say she liked the landscapes or the picture of someone’s plastic flamingo. She could lie, and pretend she wasn’t here to rekindle a friendship she’d never actually had, to check on a classmate whose secret she didn’t want to know but knew anyway.

(She could lie, and keep telling her mom that everything between them was fine. It wasn’t.)

She scrolled back through the timeline again. The same slightly-blurry photos, as if Kana hadn’t had the time to stand still and take them properly. The same buildings, the same pets. Some cat shoving its face into a flowerbed, sniffing at the lilies.

Futaba glanced back at Mona, still sleeping on her bed. Stretched out across the length of it and looking as happy as any cat could, given enough space to do whatever they pleased in. She glanced back at the screen—tabby cat, with pollen smeared across its nose.

She took a breath and clicked.

* * *

Shinya didn’t run into the boys from the park for the rest of Golden Week. He stayed at home, holed up in his room until his mom raised her brows at him from across the table at breakfast and asked if he was alright.

He’d said yes, and lied about how the arcade was always too busy during the holidays. Said he couldn’t stand gaming when he might smack some kid in the nose with his controller, even though said kid should know not to stand too close to the King when he was in his gaming zone.

His mom had dropped the issue, but then he’d felt the pressure to leave the house, so he had.

Except, without any money, there weren’t many places he could go. The park was out—and clearly unsafe—and so was half of the stops he could have gone to.

Shibuya was free, though, and if he was lucky he could find some change on the ground. Enough to challenge someone at the arcade with; enough to earn a few games of Gun About and kill a few hours of time until he went back home.

But he didn’t. He wandered the train lines aimlessly for an hour or so finding nothing but the stares of concerned station attendants. One of them actually glared at him, and he glared right back, daring the old fart to do something.

He hadn’t, but by then searching had gotten dull. Shinya wandered onto Central Street and tried to find something else to do—and it turned out that wasn’t much different. He tried to avoid the crowded street by sticking to the sides, but wound up running into people coming out of shops or waiting in line at the crepe stand. Even a gym in an alley was packed, with a line out the door of men and women waiting to get in, and an angry blond guy glared at them all, then turned his focus on Shinya.

Shinya, who’d had enough of people glaring at him over the week, turned heel and ignored him.

(It wasn’t running away. It was a strategic retreat—why should he stand around and deal with everyone else’s attitudes if he didn’t have to?)

He went down the rest of the line of shops: Big Bang Burger, packed; the pharmacy on the corner, packed; the movie theater, packed. Definitely no one willing to give him a few hundred yen to get him out from underfoot, and the street turned muggy and hot under the noon sun.

He was tired, and hungry. Someone mentioned cheap food from a machine down an alley; all Shinya had on him was two hundred yen, the coins jingling in his pocket, and he wasn’t about to try for pity water at the diner when it was as packed as the rest of the street, so he headed down the other alley. This one led to cool shade and a plethora of bikes left standing in the middle of the alley, effectively blocking it off, and a store a couple of guys in suits were staring at, muttering under their breath all the while.

 **Untouchable** , said the sign, and Shinya nearly scoffed at how pretentious it was. The only thing untouchable around here was Shinya and those bikes that had probably rusted into place.

Still, he went in. Air conditioning blasted him in the face. Some tomboy sitting at the counter said, “Welcome.”

“Uh, yeah,” Shinya said, and did a double take: under the glass counter her magazine was resting on was a display of knives, the blades sharp and wicked and deadly. They gleamed in the lights in the case, and with a start, he saw the next one: slim brass knuckles and chunky, heavy ones and ones with small blades between every knuckle.

“Don’t worry,” said the receptionist with a small, knowing smile, “they’re all models. Harmless. You can hold one, if you like.”

“Uh,” he said, and cursed how tongue-tied the sight of these weapons made him, “sure.”

She brought out some tiny knife, bent and flexed it between her hands, then set it on the counter for him. Shinya took it; it was lighter than he thought, and kind of floppy on the blade. “It’s just wood and rubber,” the receptionist explained as he ran a finger along the blade. It didn’t even hurt.

He wasn’t very disappointed, though. The thing looked real. Like a real knife.

Good enough to scare off anyone else who would be willing to make him lose.

He gave it back after some minutes spent just looking it over, marveling over the details in the hilt—wooden, and carved—and how it fit almost seamlessly into the blade.

She smiled at him when he finally handed it over. “Take your time looking around. I’ll be right here if you have any questions.”

And went back to her magazine. Glossy pages with glossy pictures of camo gear and gas masks, serious-eyed men daring anyone to defy them from the page.

Shinya turned around, and nearly smacked into a fat guy practically worshiping a display of semi-automatic rifles, tears threatening to pour down his face at the sight. “The latest model,” he whimpered as Shinya sidestepped away. “Gorgeous.”

 _Freak_ , Shinya thought, although he was impressed by the display, too. Guns weren’t supposed to be pretty, they were supposed to be tools, instruments of destruction. And so many all in one place, hanging off the wall as if waiting for someone to grab and use them— _that_ was breathtaking.

Shinya walked around the crowded shop, eyeing the sniper rifles and the grenade launchers, running his hands over the molded carvings on a club, feeling the rubber spikes like thorns along a whip’s length. There were axes and katanas and curved sabers; there were slingshots and camo gear for pets and ray guns; there were tiny pocket revolvers and more impressive handguns and shotguns. He thought he saw a minigun hanging from the ceiling, then looked at the price tag and paled.

Way too many fucking zeroes on that thing.

Hidden in a corner, he found the cheap food: rations from a turnstile machine, guaranteed to keep energy up on any kind of battlefield.

He wasn’t sure if he was brave enough to try it, given how dusty the machine was. His two hundred yen seemed even flimsier than they had before.

The world was all sorts of unfair. How was he supposed to manage like this? Was he supposed to run out into the nearest shop and hope they’d hire a middle-schooler?

(What would his mom think?)

“Trust me, you don’t want to try those.” The receptionist chuckled from her seat. She flipped a page in her magazine. “If you want really cheap food, try 777 down the street. Chips are better than those things.”

Chips and instant ramen could be good enough, if he had enough, which he didn’t. One or the other, then, and he would have to brave the crowd to get anything.

It was better than nothing. A bag of chips or some noodles could tide him over until he got home and could eat whatever he wanted out of the fridge. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t tried that first, except that he was out of the damn house and didn’t want to go back, not even for food. Scrounging around Shibuya and ignoring his hunger with games of Gun About had been the plan; he hadn’t thought of how he’d have to walk by the crepe stand or Big Bang Burger or even 777 and smell what everyone else was eating: grilled chicken crepes and hot dogs on sticks and fries; chocolate cream and onion rings and warmed bento boxes. He hadn’t thought of how he’d have to walk by and watch everyone else drink cola or melon soda or milkshakes.

He hadn’t thought, like a loser. Losers reacted; kings planned.

(He was a king, wasn’t he?)

“If you say so,” Shinya told her, and ignored her farewell as the door shut behind him. His two hundred yen jingled in his pocket; he took one deep breath of cooking food and his stomach grumbled, complaining. It was past noon, past lunch, and he was hungry and tired and done with all of these people and their happy smiles, their laughing faces.

He played the game on his way home. Pink Girl was close to a level up, but not close enough.

It was good enough for him. He would spend some time today in the game making her stronger, still wishing he could dye her hair a different color, and still be able to tell his mom he went out earlier.

She’d take that. It was better than nothing.


	4. June, Part One

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Should I up the rating back to M, or leave it...?

Yuuki held his phone away from his ear as Futaba gushed on the other end. Her mother was finally, _finally_ coming back home to Japan and he had to meet her and she had to meet everybody and see how well Mona was doing and how well Sojiro’s shop was doing and how well Futaba was doing helping out there when she could and how well Futaba was doing in school, even if it was a draining mess most of the time. She hated gym with a passion that rivaled Yuuki’s hatred of math, but her composition scores were getting better. All of his tutoring was paying off.

“Do you think she’ll be proud of me?” Futaba asked at the end of her tirade, once her endless stream of words had finally made her pause for breath.

“How could she not be?” Yuuki asked back. If Ms. Isshiki knew half of what was going on with her daughter while she was away, she’d have to be proud. Futaba had fought her demons and came out the victor, and made friends, and was going back to school. Futaba was, slowly but surely, overcoming her fear of strangers. She was talking to her classmates at lunch. She wanted to join a club.

“I dunno,” Futaba said. “You know how sometimes you think everything you do just isn’t enough? It’s like that. What if I haven’t done enough to make her proud of me?”

“You’ve done enough,” Yuuki said. He couldn’t make a judgment call on this woman before he even met her, but he wanted to say, _Then she’s not really your mother._

But people were complicated. Ms. Isshiki could be disappointed Futaba wasn’t in her senior year of high school. She could be disappointed Futaba had spent three years wandering the back alleys of Yongen-Jaya or cooped up in her room. She could be disappointed Boss hadn’t made her go back to school whether she was ready or not.

She could be disappointed her daughter had to rely on drugs to have this normal life.

“I hope Mona remembers her,” Futaba said. He could hear her flicking a cat toy around, the bell jingling whenever Mona swatted at it. “He was already old when she brought him home, so he should. Right, Mona? You remember Mom, right?”

Yuuki thought he heard Mona meow over the line. It sounded indignant; as if a cat would forget the one who brought him home from a shelter about to put him down. As if a cat couldn’t repay that kind of debt by remembering one single, simple person.

Then he thought he heard her alarm go off: seven o’clock, which meant running to Leblanc for dinner and her meds. Futaba wished him goodbye and hung up.

Yuuki sat there with his phone outstretched for a good minute. Futaba’s mother was coming home. Futaba was probably going to move out of Boss’s house, was probably going to have to move to a different ward of Tokyo. There was nothing wrong with that. Yusuke had done that.

Yuuki just wasn’t sure how well Futaba would handle the news. A prominent scientist like Ms. Isshiki wouldn’t want to live in Yongen-Jaya’s back alleys, no matter how homey they were; she’d want space, and sleek furniture, and probably a good view of the city skyline.

(Maybe she was only coming back to pack up Futaba and take her with her, back to America—)

Yuuki could hope she was nice, and proud, and understanding enough to leave Futaba where she was comfortable. Moving her now, to anywhere else, would probably shove her back in that hole she’d tried so hard to claw her way out of.

Yuuki didn’t want to see that. He didn’t want her to reject their after-tutoring gaming sessions at her place, or his passable attempts at coffee brewing, or even the little touches he’d gotten used to giving her. He liked the way they had to curl up together to watch Featherman reruns on her laptop. He liked the way she never questioned his sudden cancellations; he liked the way he did the same, too, whenever something was bothering her too much.

He could give his friends space without thinking they were going to leave him, now. Didn’t that mean he’d grown up, just a little?

(Would Akira be proud of him?)

After what felt like a long time, Yuuki put his phone down. He shut his laptop on the screen he’d been staring at the whole time Futaba was talking and went over to his closet, where he’d put all the junk he’d never thought he’d need. It took some searching, but he finally found the slip of paper in a shoebox, the note Mrs. Amamiya had given him what felt like a long time ago.

 _If you ever want to talk_ , it said, and listed a number. About Akira, he thought, or even if he wanted an outside opinion, probably. Neutral territory, instead of the well-meaning words of his friends and father.

It took him too long to put the number in. It took him too long to press dial.

It took no time at all for Mrs. Amamiya to answer. “Hello?”

“Hello, Mrs. Amamiya,” he said, and cursed the trembling in his voice. “It’s me—um, I mean, it’s Mishima. Yuuki Mishima. You gave me your number back in March.”

“Mishima!” she exclaimed. “Yes, of course I remember! How is the necklace? Do you like it?”

“I do. It’s a, uh, very nice necklace.”

“Oh, good,” she sighed in relief. “We were worried you wouldn’t, but Emiko thought it would be nice to have something of Ren’s with you. It’s what helped her all these years—having something of Goro’s—and she thought you might like it. A little piece of Ren to wish on.”

“So it was Ren’s,” he said. He’d thought so, and now he knew he was right. Ren’s necklace, holding their rings. Ren’s necklace, that he was tarnishing with his skin oils. Yusuke had had to take him to a jewelry store, to learn how to keep the shine from fading, once he’d found out about it.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Amamiya, “it was Ren’s. We thought he’d like it, too, you having something of his. Like the boyfriend shirt, but more inconspicuous.”

“Boyfriend… shirt?”

“We were young once, too, you know,” she laughed. “We can bring you one of his next time we’re in Tokyo.”

Ren’s—Akira’s—shirts. Yuuki wondered how they would fit. If they would fit. If they would smell like him, or if they would smell like must from sitting in a closet. If they would smell like Akira at all, as Yuuki imagined him to: like curry spices and sage shampoo, spicy and cutting; or if they would smell like Ren, whatever Ren smelled like.

Yuuki didn’t know much about Ren, just Akira. He’d want one of Akira’s shirts, for sure—but not Ren’s. Ren wasn’t his, although Mrs. Amamiya didn’t know that yet. She had no idea Yuuki called her son Akira. She had no idea Yuuki couldn’t help him anymore.

“You don’t have to do that,” Yuuki told her, marveling at the fact that this woman was so different from his own mother. Hiyoko Mishima wouldn’t walk within ten miles of Yuuki anymore; he couldn’t imagine her bringing his boyfriend his things like this. Couldn’t imagine her grieving over losing him in any way. As far as Yuuki knew, she’d gone back to work with the aura of a woman who was trying to throw her personal life away, a ferocity her husband knew she couldn’t keep up for long. “The necklace is enough for me.”

Because he had rings, and videos of Akira on his phone, and backups of said videos on his laptop. Because he had photos of Akira to look at and a forum full of people helping him out.

“Well, just let me know if you change your mind,” Mrs. Amamiya said, and it struck him as odd that she cared so much for the well-being of her son’s kind-of boyfriend enough to ask if Yuuki wanted a shirt. It was probably some kind of coping deal. She was just as hurt—if not more so—by all of this as Yuuki was, even if he hadn’t known Ren before he’d disappeared.

“Speaking of,” he said, “are you really letting the missing person’s case go? Are you sure?”

“Of course we’re sure,” she said. “We talked about it a lot. We talked about it until we were sick of it, and then we talked about it some more. No one here is going to forget, but we’ll let the rest of the country sleep easy at night. Emiko doesn’t like it, but she’s agreed, too. We trust you to bring our boy home, Mishima.”

“Oh,” he said. Of course she did. She didn’t know what he’d done, what he’d made Akira do.

“How is he? How is Ren? Is he eating enough? Taking care of himself?”

“Oh, well…” It was so hard to say. It should be easy; it wasn’t. “I, uh, I don’t actually know. How he’s doing.”

“You don’t?”

“I don’t,” he said. “I—he—there was nothing else I could do. There was nothing else I could do to help him. My part was over. He had to—I mean, I made him, but he had to let go, to keep moving forward. He had to, if he wanted a chance to come home again. I couldn’t have helped him anymore, so I made him do it. He wants to come home, and I want him to come home, too, and there wouldn’t have been any use in him sitting there, knowing how he could take the chance and not doing it because he wanted to stay with me. I don’t want him like that.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Amamiya. It sounded like a gasp. It sounded like a wail.

Upstairs, the neighbor’s kid started crying.

“So I can’t talk to him anymore,” Yuuki went on. “I can’t check on him to see how he’s doing. I don’t—I mean, I can’t—I don’t have it anymore. The connection to him. The app. I want it so bad, but it’s not meant for me. I’m just—I’m just sitting here, waiting for someone else to do what I wish I could be doing, and it’s awful. I can’t stand it.”

“Mishima,” Mrs. Amamiya said, in a voice that trembled as much as his own. “I wish you’d told me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought, if you were with him, he’d be alright. But—now there are strangers helping him? Is that what you mean to say? There are strangers helping my boy come home, while the people who care about him most have to sit back and do nothing?”

“I made a website,” Yuuki said, though it was a feeble defense. He could hear the steel in her voice; all of her earlier good-natured charm was gone. “For—for the people helping him. It hasn’t gotten much traffic, but I thought it was better than nothing.”

“A website,” Mrs. Amamiya said, as if he’d said he’d made posters. As if his website would be as much help in bringing Akira back as her shouting into the wind for it to happen.

“I’m sorry.”

A huffed sigh. The crying kid upstairs, her mother’s footsteps falling heavy until he could hear her pacing, pick out exactly where on the ceiling she was. “No,” said Mrs. Amamiya, “I’m sorry. You said there was nothing more you could do for him. It hurt you, too, to let him go like that.”

“I didn’t want him to hate me, but I didn’t want him to stay there. I thought I could handle it, if he hated me but had come home. I thought I could handle letting him go like that, but it’s… hard. Harder than I thought. I wish I could talk to him again—but if I get the chance to I won’t be able to let him go again.”

“I know,” was her response. “It was hard, giving him back to you. But I’m glad you let us listen to him—whether it was the last time we would ever hear his voice again or not. I know, Mishima.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said. Yuuki didn’t understand how she could bounce back from all of that so quickly. He was still ready to break down into tears because he’d failed her when she was depending on him the most. “Don’t be sorry, Mishima. You’ve done all you can. You’re still helping him, even if it’s not directly. That’s more than his father and I have done. That’s more than we’ve managed to do, aside from get that awful snake into a cage that’s suitable for him. Why don’t you—why don’t you come visit over summer break? You can see Ren’s hometown. Just for a few days.”

Definitely coping, said some little part of him that was still stuck on his therapist’s words. Why else would she want some unknown stranger to visit her and her husband? Why else would she want him to visit, other than to talk about Ren?

(Because Ren was her son. Because she loved him, and wanted to show him off to everyone she could, even when he’d been missing for a couple of years, now. Because Yuuki loved Ren, too, in her mind, and Ren and Akira were one and the same.)

Yuuki couldn’t remember the last time he’d traveled anywhere. The school trip didn’t count, as they’d done schoolwork, of all things, up in some temple district in Kyoto. He’d barely gotten to sightsee. He’d barely wanted to, too preoccupied with Akira.

“Sure,” he said, “that sounds good.”

“I’ll have to air out the guest futon, then,” Mrs. Amamiya said. “What—what do you like to eat? I’ll make some when you visit.”

Coping, his brain said, though now she was starting to sound like an overbearing aunt, or maybe a grandmother. “Curry,” Yuuki said. Akira liked it. He’d taught Yuuki his recipe; it was in one of the videos, though Yuuki didn’t think he could go searching for it at the moment.

“Curry, then. I’ll look forward to seeing you, Mishima.”

“Y-yeah,” he said, at a loss. It felt like a long time since a stranger had told him they were excited to see him. He’d gotten used to seeing his friends and the few adults he knew almost weekly. “I’ll look forward to it, too.”

She hung up, probably to go cry. The neighbor’s kid upstairs had quieted; his apartment seemed strangely stifling in its noiseless state, as though the silence had a will and was pressing in on him.

It was after seven. Too late for him to ask if anyone wanted to hang out; too late for him to do much of anything if he wanted to make the last train home. He could stay and cook, and work on an essay for one of his classes. Get a little bit farther along with his homework. Try to find that video of Akira’s curry recipe.

There was nothing wrong with a bit of quiet. Maybe he’d been surrounding himself with too much noise, trying to keep every thought of Akira at bay—not that it’d been working. Akira crept into his every thought whether Yuuki actively wanted him to or not.

Maybe, when he visited, he’d tell the Amamiya’s that Akira was probably the only reason he was still alive. Maybe they’d tell him about all of the people that Ren had helped over the years, all the cats stuck in trees he’d probably helped, all the gymnastics competitions he’d won. Maybe they’d be proud that their son had helped one more person on this earth, even when he was hundreds of millions of light-years away in another dimension.

Maybe Yuuki would tell them that, too. He had no proof of it anymore, but he could hope they would believe him.

Akira was their son. For his sake, at least, Yuuki hoped they would.

* * *

Ryuji wasn’t entirely sure what he was doing at Leblanc so late, just that he was, and Boss had asked him to watch the shop while he took a cigarette break. Ryuji knew he liked to go down the alley and talk to that guy always sitting next to his radio and would be gone for at least half an hour, so he settled down at the bar and prepared to tell people that they’d have to wait for their coffee if they wanted any. Most of the time nobody came in—which was probably why Boss let him handle the store—but Ryuji couldn’t shake the feeling of anticipation he’d get whenever Boss left him here like this.

All it took was one smug asshole to ruin everything. Ryuji knew that pretty well.

The news made good background noise as he scrolled through messages on his phone: ones from Yuuki asking about the cafe; ones from Yusuke that were nothing but landscape photos of the park or fliers of coupons hanging on the bulletin board in his apartment complex; ones from Futaba asking him for ice cream or weird soda or to go with her to Akihabara; ones from his ma reminding him they needed milk or eggs or telling him thanks for cleaning up last week; ones from Ann, the most recent being a selfie of her in her American graduation robes, some weird hat pinned to her hair. She wasn’t wearing pigtails for once. She wasn’t the only blonde head in the picture for once, either: at least half a dozen boys and girls stood around in the background, dirty blonde and strawberry blonde and platinum blonde, hair ranging from sunny golden-yellow to the spill of moonlight across still water. Ann’s was an ashy blonde, somewhere on the lighter end, and he couldn’t help but trace the curves it made over her shoulders, down her chest.

He didn’t expect her to come back to Japan. America was full of people just like her, blonde and mixed and struggling to find a place to fit in. There was no reason for her to come back to Japan: she’d have to take the college entrance exams a year late, she’d have to deal with being an outcast all over again, she’d have to deal with everyone thinking lesser of her just because of her hair color.

It was shit. He hated it. Ann was probably the only person who’d made fun of his bleach job because he’d done it wrong, not because he’d done it to stand out. She was the only one to offer to get him better bleach, better dye, anything to make his hair not look like he’d poured a melted yellow crayon all over his head.

(She’d also only done that after Kamoshida was safely in police custody and her best friend was sitting in a hospital bed, struggling to remember how to walk, but Ryuji figured that he would’ve kept his mouth shut, too, if he were her.)

Ryuji groaned and face-planted into the bar. The bell above the door jingled; he jerked up to attention to say Boss was out—

“Oh, is Mr. Sakura out?” asked the goth-doctor Ryuji knew visited sometimes. She’d fixed up Yuuki last year after he’d fainted and smacked his head on the table. Ryuji still didn’t know her name.

“Yeah,” he said. “No coffee ‘til Boss is back. Sorry.”

“Well, that’s alright,” said goth-doctor, and Ryuji wondered whether he’d go to the doctor’s more often if his had legs like that. She turned to someone right behind her and said, “You said you don’t much go for coffee, right? It’s a shame; Mr. Sakura has some of the best around.”

Her mystery guest shook her head and grit out, “Tea is fine.”

Goth-doctor frowned. “You need caffeine. _Some_ caffeine at least.”

“Black tea is caffeinated,” said mystery guest, in a way Ryuji recognized. _Let me educate you_ , it said, _because you clearly need it_. _Let me sit down at sleep this off_ , it also said, because as much as she probably didn’t want it to her voice shook through the words, as if she was struggling just to speak.

Then she lifted her head. Ryuji recognized those eyes and recognized when she recognized him.

“Holy shit,” he said, at the same time she exclaimed, “Sakamoto?!”

Goth-doctor looked between the two of them, sighed, and grabbed a booth.

“I can’t believe this,” said her guest, and now Ryuji could recognize the rest of her voice, even though he hadn’t heard it in two years. No one could forget Makoto Niijima’s voice, not when they heard it twice daily for nearly a year. She’d nagged at him for his hair, his choice of undershirt, the fact that one of his shoes had come untied on the walk over from the station, his posture. Perfect Miss Student Council President, always getting on the delinquent’s case, because that was what student council presidents did.

“ _You_ can’t?!” he said, and jolted out of his chair. “ _I_ can’t believe this! I thought—I mean, you went to _jail_ , right?”

“Juvenile hall,” she corrected, and he pretended the haughty sniff at the end was just her sinuses bothering her and not actually a haughty sniff.

“I just—you’re still in Tokyo? Why?”

Why stay when the already cutthroat job market would pretend she didn’t exist? Why stay when it was hard enough for Ryuji’s ma to make ends meet with a cushy job at the bank? Why stay when it had to be hard for her?

“I can’t just leave,” she said, sliding into goth-doctor’s booth. “Not yet, anyway. There are some things I have to take care of, and I won’t leave until they are.”

“We’ll take some curry. Larges,” said goth-doctor.

“And one black tea,” said Niijima, leaning heavily on one hand, rubbing at her temple. Digging her fingers in, as if the pressure would keep her migraine away.

Ha, yeah right. Ryuji dug around in the cabinets in the kitchen—no black tea, a bunch of bottles of prescription meds for Futaba, some generic painkillers. Boss’s stash of soda sat in the fridge, innocent and innocuous enough to make anyone wonder why he hated them so much. Ryuji grabbed a cola and a bottle of water and went back to the cafe.

Niijima glared at the offered soda with a force that might have melted the bottle. Ryuji shrugged, helpless. “Boss doesn’t have any tea in here,” he said. “You want it or not?”

She sighed, but took the bottle. Doctor Goth asked for a couple of cups so he dug around behind the bar to give them some, then went back for their curry. She was nice—nicer than he remembered, ordering them all out of the attic and the cafe entirely to give Yuuki space—but Niijima glared.

“Boss’s got some painkillers if you want one,” Ryuji told her.

“What brand?” Doctor Goth asked.

“Uh, Equal,” he said. Junes brand. Of course the only thing not original and brand-name in the whole store was the painkillers. “You wanna see?”

“I do.”

So he brought her the bottle. Let her pick one out before handing it over to Niijima, who was glaring at her food. Headaches were always shit, but migraines were worse—sometimes there wasn’t anything he could do for the ones his ma got except be quiet and leave her to sit in the dark for a while. He hoped Niijima’s wasn’t one like that. All that time spent waiting for it to go away, his ma always said, felt like a waste.

Ryuji left them to eat. Niijima seemed a bit better after the pill, or the food, or even the cola, and Ryuji wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Any day where Student Council Prez Makoto Niijima wasn’t glaring at him for some stupid thing or other was a good day; why should he ruin it?

Settled back on his bar stool, Ryuji glanced at his messages. Nothing new in the past ten minutes—and why should there be?—but now he felt weird, sitting around waiting for the two in the corner to finish their meal. They were chatting softly enough that Ryuji only caught a bit of their conversation. Something about a trial, or a clinic. Doctor Goth worked at one; maybe Niijima was helping her out for some quick cash.

“I just can’t believe he’s trying to shut you down,” Niijima said at one point, loudly enough that Ryuji heard every word. He tried to pretend to be focused on the news, currently showing a segment on increased gang activity in the city, and heard Doctor Goth tell her to keep it down.

“No one needs to know just yet,” she said, before the conversation dipped again.

Boss didn’t come back, even when they were done. Ryuji went over to take their plates as they finished up their drinks, and Doctor Goth asked, “Your friend. How is he?”

Probably trying to keep from crying himself sick, Ryuji wanted to say. It was obvious that Yuuki missed Akira way, way too much to be healthy, throwing himself at the first thing that would occupy his attention. Ryuji had to coax him out of the gym the other day before the guy burnt out, and they hadn’t been back since. “He’s alright,” he said with a shrug, instead. “Thanks for what you did, by the way. Whatever you told him, it helped.”

“I only told him to get better help,” Doctor Goth said.

“Better—oh.” A therapist, like the ones at the rehab center. Ryuji’s ma had wanted him to see one after the Kamoshida shitshow, but Ryuji hadn’t wanted to. There was nothing wrong with him, he’d said. There was nothing wrong with being angry that an asshole got off scot-free while Ryuji was the one being criminalized by his own damn school.

Yuuki had never mentioned a therapist. That didn’t mean he wasn’t seeing one.

“But it’s good to hear that he’s doing better. And his boyfriend? How is he?”

Niijima frowned at that. Ryuji felt weird—felt like one of those gossiping assholes from Shujin, actually—but said, “They kinda had a fight. They’re not talking right now.”

“I see,” said Doctor Goth. She laid out some bills on the table, took one last swig of her water, and got up. “I’ll see you next week, guinea pig.”

“Of course,” Niijima said, but wouldn’t look up from the table. Ryuji took the cash and Doctor Goth’s cup and cleaned up, putting the money in the register. Exact change, even with the bottles of drinks.

Niijima sat at the table, stirring the ice in her cup. Ryuji sat at the bar, trying to wish her gone. It wasn’t working; the longer the news droned on, the louder her stirring seemed to get.

Boss was gone a damn long time. Maybe he wanted to close up early today; maybe he fell asleep in the shade of the buildings. Old people did that, though Boss couldn’t have been that old.

“You aren’t going to ask?” Niijima said, at last. Her voice was weak. She wasn’t the proud Student Council President anymore, just a lost woman with nothing to lose.

“Ask what you’re doing with Doctor Goth over there, or ask why you’re staying in Tokyo when you shoulda got out months ago?” Ryuji asked. “Or, ask why you’re asking me why I’m not going to ask, even when it’s none of my business?”

Futaba would have liked that, if she were here. Boss would have just scoffed out a laugh and pretended he hadn’t.

“You seemed surprised to see me, that’s all,” Niijima said.

“Surprised to see you like that, you mean,” he said. He turned around in his bar stool; the old Miss Prez Makoto Niijima would have been prim and proper and kind of vain about it, with not a hair out of place and her nails perfectly trimmed and her uniform skirt starched and pressed. New Makoto Niijima, the one a year out of juvie, was rumpled: her hair looked like it hadn’t met a proper brush in weeks, her shirt had several remnants of stains on it, and she was wearing flip-flops.

It was June, and it was hot and stifling, but he’d never thought Niijima would be the kind of person to wear old T-shirts with questionable stains on them out on the streets.

“Besides,” he went on, “you kinda already told me. Something to do before you leave. Not my business, that’s for sure.”

“I see.” She sipped at her drink. “And, I suppose it’s none of my business how you’re doing, is it? How… the others are doing?”

“We’re fine,” he said. Better than Niijima. Yuuki might be living in a dump of an apartment, but he still managed to do his laundry. “No thanks to you.”

She winced. He glared at her. “You didn’t seriously spend the last two or three years feeling sorry you didn’t help us out more, did you? Tell me you didn’t.”

“I did,” she admitted. “I had some measure of authority to do something. My sister is a prosecutor. I knew who I would have had to go to, if I wanted to do something, but I let Principal Kobayakawa talk me out of it every time. I… wanted his approval first. I wanted someone to look at what I wanted to do and tell me it was okay. You saw what happened when I didn’t.”

She got arrested. As far as Ryuji knew, Prosecutor Niijima had disowned her little sister and wouldn’t answer any kind question about her anymore. The shot she’d taken to her reputation had been nearly fatal for her career.

Ryuji knew what that was like. He also knew what it was like to be a big fucking screw-up.

Still, he was pissed that she’d come in here dragging the past behind her like an anchor. He wanted to be over it.

They all wanted to be over it.

“Don’t tell _me_ you’re sorry,” he said. “I ain’t accepting that shit. You can try with the others, but you can forget about getting anything from me.”

“I—of course,” she said. “I, ah, should go, shouldn’t I? Thank you for the soda.”

He watched her run from the cafe, the back of her T-shirt filled with holes along the hem and fluttering. It was a size too big and looked more like the kind of shirt Ryuji would sleep in, but she was gone before he could ask, before he even thought of asking. It was only with the sound of the cafe’s bell ringing in his ears that he realized that maybe, just maybe, Miss Prez Makoto Niijima had wanted some kind of help from him.

Maybe she’d wanted some kind of help all along.

* * *

“ _Are you alright?”_ Akira asked.

Yusuke blinked and returned to his phone. The app didn’t give him the chance to say whether he really was fine or not, and he supposed it didn’t matter, when Akira kept talking.

 _“_ _I can see a rest point up ahead,”_ he said, _“although we did just clear out all the enemies here, so if you want to take a break… Well, it’s your call.”_

Yusuke’s call, as if Akira weren’t chomping at the bit to get this finished. They’d spent so long running around fighting monsters that Yusuke barely remembered what they were doing here in the first place. He barely remembered where they were.

Akira—and by extension, Yuuki—needed him to be more dependable than this. He needed to get himself together.

… He needed a break.

Between school and his job and helping Akira and trying to remember the joy he once felt for painting, Yusuke was spread thin. He felt a headache coming on; Akira stood back and rubbed at his arms, the skin breaking out into gooseflesh. He said the temperature on board the Soreil was ideal, but that never meant he didn’t want for a jacket.

Yusuke eyed the sleeveless shirt, the gloves that barely covered his hands, the cascade of fabric swathing his legs, and wondered why Akira didn’t just fashion himself a jacket out of all of that leftover material. Did he really need such a long sash? Why not just repurpose it?

(Although, the app did mention that the outfit’s designer meant something to Akira. Someone important, someone precious, had made the ensemble. Was it really Yusuke’s right to question whether Akira kept it the same in her memory or not?)

He headed for the rest point. Akira looked disappointed—yet changed track to smiling and acting as if they had all the time in the world—when he saw it.

 _“_ _I guess we’re done for the day, then,”_ he said. _“I’ll look forward to continuing later, when you have some more time.”_

“Don’t lie,” Yusuke said, although Akira never heard a thing he said. “You don’t want to wait. You want to thrust yourself headlong into danger. Goro can wait a few more hours, you know.”

Because, yes, Yusuke remembered now: they were off to find Goro, who was hiding somewhere within the ship. Yusuke didn’t understand half of what was going on, but Goro did. Goro had ordered them to do it, even if he hadn’t been talking to Akira at the time.

And Akira… how would he take it all? He’d understood the loss of his power to overlook the universe, so there was no question he would be able to understand it mentally, but…

Yusuke feared how he would react when he found out Yusuke was controlling not only the robot but one of his precious friends, too. The man was suffering amnesia. He remembered not a single thing of his time on Ra Ciela, and barely remembered what he’d been doing ever since Yusuke took control. It was the reason he was so good in battle, he said, although he didn’t know that Yusuke was the one in control for the battles, too.

He would be angry when he eventually found out. Who wouldn’t be, knowing some god from another world, another universe, was controlling his every action? He would want his autonomy back.

Yusuke just hoped it didn’t come to another fight. He wasn’t sure if Akira could handle another one of those, one where he faced his own friends down and struggled to tell them everything they knew was wrong. They hadn’t listened the first time; Yusuke doubted another fight would be much different.

Still, he saved and exited the app and then curled up in bed. The springs in it creaked, and while it wasn’t much different from the creaking floorboards at the atelier, it still sounded different. It grated in his ears.

The painting leaning against the wall grated on his eyes. Yusuke wondered why he’d put it there, where all he would have to do to see it in the morning was roll over. He knew that was the point—put it in plain sight where he would always be reminded that the way he felt was wrong—and at least this way, he wouldn’t have to look at the painting on the easel. His eyes had strayed to it far too much over the past hour; he found his head angling to find it again, that sketch of the one he loved, the preliminary lines already in paint.

Yusuke couldn’t even think his name anymore, without feeling a pang of heartache. It hurt too much for him to stand it for too long.

With a grunt, he got up. Staring at the easel wasn’t what he wanted to do today. Staring at pictures of Yuuki—lovely though he may be—wasn’t what he wanted to do today. A glance at the clock told him it was late, but the trains were still running. He could go somewhere. Fresh air always did him good.

But, where? Not Shibuya; Yusuke wasn’t sure how much of the flash and lights he could stand tonight. Not Shinjuku, where he’d been catcalled and wolf-whistled while he browsed a bookstore, staying as far away from the more risque magazines as he could, even though he was of age and could buy them, if he wanted to. He hadn’t liked the look of pity a fortune-teller on the street had given him, either, as if she knew his fate with love just by looking at him.

Where, then? Jinbocho? In the light from hanging lamps even the best of paintings would become muddy and indistinct; there was no use in browsing for art books so late. Akihabara was absolutely garish at the best of times. He had no money for the planetarium in Ikebukuro.

Yusuke’s eyes landed on his sketchpad, open to yet another sketch of Akira. Falling asleep in the bath as Yusuke took his time selecting Genometrica Crystals, his voice a soft murmur when they chatted beforehand. It had been late; Akira’s eyes had been hooded with the onset of sleep; he had looked, for once, exactly like a defenseless teenage boy, his posture slumped with exhaustion. His scars had been hidden in shadow and steam, blurred until they ran together, so different than when he held himself proud and tall and showed off every one.

Like stained glass, Yusuke had thought. Now he knew where to go: Kanda and its churches, where saints and devils and angels warred for space upon the walls, where the glass was more beautiful than their deeds.

He snatched up his bag and a can of potato sticks from the growing tower on his shelf and left. The trains were mostly empty, filled only with tired businessmen and their drunken brethren, and Yusuke stayed clear of them. Five hundred yen to view some stained glass windows, even from outside, was a small price to pay. His wallet, for once, didn’t disagree.

But once he was there, he realized he had no idea how to start and no idea whether late-night church-goers would catch him gawking from the street and report him for some minor misdemeanor. The last thing he wanted was to cause Nakanohara more trouble, and a night in jail would definitely cause him trouble.

“Oh, dear,” he wound up mumbling.

A girl getting off the train from the next car over must have heard him. She turned his way and asked, “Is something the matter?”

“Ah, well,” Yusuke said, and laid out his predicament as best as he could. The girl’s face looked familiar. He thought he recognized the pin in her hair—it was distinctly Japanese, a simple knot of red cord—but, then again, he could have seen it anywhere.

“Stained glass?” she asked. “The churches here do have some very lovely pieces; are you going to do a piece in that kind of style next, Kitagawa?”

“Not quite. It’s just a personal interest of mine at the moment.” He frowned. Really, he thought he was better with faces. It was better just to own up to not knowing her than to lead her on. “My apologies. Have we met before?”

She didn’t look surprised, or even offended. She offered him a smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “I’m Hifumi Togo. We went to Kosei together, although we only ever saw each other in passing. I remember you because you were so tall, and, well, after everything that happened with your teacher…”

She winced. He winced. Madarame was still a sore subject; the nurses at the rehab center told Yusuke it was a miracle he’d grown as much as he did on as little as he was eating. He’d remarked that he hadn’t had much choice in the matter, that it was only a matter of having the correct genes for it. Not everyone grew tall no matter how much they ate, after all, and he knew they had hated him for even arguing his point. He had thought he’d heard one of them cry out in the hallway, once the door to his room was safely shut.

“We must have passed each other by, then,” Yusuke said, choosing to ignore Madarame for the moment, “as you do look somewhat familiar.”

“I was in the general division,” Togo supplied.

“Ah, I see.”

Kosei kept its Fine Arts students and its general admissions students in nearly separate buildings. Yusuke’s art classes had dominated his schedule, but even he had to take the basics: math, English, literature… although, whenever he had asked Madarame for help on his homework, his former teacher had only ever clicked his tongue. It would never make him a good artist, Madarame had always said, even though Yusuke had liked the stories they read in class and the way biology broke down even simple matters like crying into complex machinations and the way mathematics took its own complex equations and condensed them down into a single, simple answer.

And he did still remember that fateful gym class. The heat of near-summer, even under the shade of the tree. How the school’s peacock had wandered onto the field, its tail held high and spread for all to see. How everything had gradually faded into a blackness, a nothingness, that he had been afraid to enter but ultimately unable not to. There had been paint on his hands, dried from the night before. There had always been paint on his hands.

“Would you like to walk with me?” Togo asked, and Yusuke jerked back to himself in time to nod, wordless, the pain likely etched onto his face.

Togo didn’t ask. She merely turned and led him out of the station and down the street. They passed all manner of stores selling religious paraphernalia—books, greeting cards, pencils with psalms on the side, mugs with sayings on them, simple knick-knacks meant to be displayed on shelves—and even a few churches, off on other streets. He had a glimpse of windows and a vague impression of steeples and arches against the night sky.

Yusuke wanted to ask where she was taking him, but she walked with such purpose that she had to know where they were going, where she was leading him. She must come here often, not to even glance down those side streets and alleys.

She must have heard him thinking, as she said, “There’s a church here I always go to when I need some quiet to work on my shogi techniques. The pastor there is very kind; he doesn’t mind that I play there, as long as it’s not during service. Luckily, there aren’t very many night services. I’m sure he’ll be happy to show you the windows. They’re very inspiring.”

“I didn’t realize you were Christian, Togo,” he said.

Togo laughed. “Oh, no, I’m not Christian. But the other temples and shrines in Tokyo always seem to mind when I sit down to play a game or two. They always chase me away. Father John here, he doesn’t mind, so I always wind up coming back, and there’s just something about the building itself that seems to draw out this—this kind of stillness from within me, like I’ve entered a trance. It’s hard to explain, really.”

“No, I think I understand. If you’ll pardon my rudeness in asking, of course.”

She laughed again. He thought he remembered several of his classmates saying Togo had a beautiful laugh; Yusuke could hear the beauty in it, could almost see the smile on her face as she gave it. Unlike Yuuki’s, it did nothing for him. Unlike his former classmates, Yusuke didn’t posses the urge to make her laugh as much as she could. “I suppose you would, wouldn’t you? Someone once said that you had commented on being so into your painting that you’d forgotten to eat dinner the night before. She was shocked that you would only remember when classes were over for the day.”

“I… forgot to do many things back then.” Homework, once Madarame’s continual artist’s block became too much for Yusuke alone to handle. Meals—well, there had never been enough food. Even bathing had taken a back seat to painting, and wringing his brain for the next piece, and hoping that this one would earn enough to keep food on the table longer than a few days.

“Do you still forget?”

“No.” It was a simple answer. He was surprised at how quickly it leaped from his tongue. “I have a guardian who doesn’t seem to mind that I’m hoarding snacks in my room instead of painting supplies. I have friends who make sure I have plenty of their leftovers sitting in my fridge every week. I… I will not have to worry over going hungry again.”

“It must be a relief, not to worry over it anymore.”

“It is. More than I thought it would be.”

He didn’t feel the need to tell her that some days he would wander into the kitchen in the middle of the night, sure that all of the food would be gone and all that would be left of it was the memory of the tastes on his tongue. He didn’t feel the need to tell her that sometimes Nakanohara was there, too, with the cabinets open all around him and a pile of cans pulled from one or the other sitting on the table. Whenever that happened, Yusuke helped him take stock of the pantry. The work was always quicker with two people.

“And,” Togo said, “well, if I’m being honest—you’re the first person to ask me if I’m Christian or not. No one else knows I come here to practice, save for Father John and whoever visits to pray, so no one knows enough ask, and no one here questions it too much. So, no, I didn’t think it was rude at all.”

“I see,” he said, and left it at that. The church Togo had been taking him to came into view, and Yusuke stared at the sight of it. It wasn’t grand; it barely rose above the roofs of nearby stores, the squat roof an actual disappointment. It had no steeple, just a small alcove with a cross in it above the door. No stained glass windows to be seen, but Yusuke decided they must be hidden from sight, out of view of prying eyes.

“It’s not the best place for a church,” Togo said, seemingly ignoring the fact that the building was all but sandwiched between two stores, “but it’s my favorite one. You’ll see when we get inside.”

Yusuke hoped so, then shook the thought away. It was rude to assume the inside would be as plain as the outside was. Not everything beautiful was that way at first; even pearls were nothing more than grains of sand, in the end.

The church was lit with soft light inside, bringing out the tones of the wooden pews, the marble on the floor, and the altar at the end of the room. It looked warm, almost inviting.

But he still did not see any windows.

“Back again, Miss Togo?” asked a nearby parishioner, her wrinkled face relaxed with the simple joy of prayer and a place to pray in. Yusuke thought he spied a cross at her throat, small and golden and catching the light.

“Yes, and I brought an old classmate of mine,” Togo said, with a smile.

Yusuke introduced himself. It felt strange, leaving out the part where he once would have proudly declared himself a student of _the_ Ichiryusai Madarame—but it also felt right. Yusuke was only himself, now.

The old parishioner smiled back at him and laughed. “My goodness, aren’t you tall, young man. The Lord must have blessed you to rise above every obstacle, and perhaps He didn’t think to mean it so literally.”

“Kitagawa has been very blessed,” Togo affirmed, then bowed. “And if you’ll excuse me, I see Father John. There’s something I need to ask him.”

The old parishioner let her go, and she and Yusuke watched her head off to a middle-aged man with the beginnings of laugh lines around his mouth. His robe was black, and just as plain as the building, and Togo bowed and smiled and looked so very at home, here in this church, that Yusuke couldn’t help but be surprised.

“Does Togo come here often?” Yusuke wound up asking.

The old parishioner only grinned at him. “Believe you me, boy, I would believe Miss Togo to be a very devout Christian if she hadn’t told me it wasn’t so herself!”

“And it doesn’t bother you? That she comes here when she doesn’t practice your religion?”

“The Lord is good and kind,” said the parishioner. “When one needs space and silence, the Lord provides, even to the lost lambs who worship at different altars. It is His way.”

His way of what? Converting otherwise happy people?

Yusuke didn’t understand, but didn’t have the chance to say so; Togo came back over with the man in the black robe in tow.

“This is him, Father,” said Togo.

The man smiled. He and Yusuke traded bows, and then said, “It is always so good to see one interested in a piece of our history. We keep the windows down in the basement, as we were forced to remove most of them when we moved chapels.”

He walked off. Yusuke followed, dimly aware of Togo staying behind to start a game of shogi with the old parishioner woman. “Moved chapels?” he asked.

Father John nodded. “Our last chapel was burnt almost to the ground some years ago,” he explained. “It was an accident. A candle toppled into a display of very lovely flowers we had set out for Easter, and the whole thing was alight before any of us noticed. One of our altar boys admitted to a sloppy job placing the candles. He was very, very distraught.”

“What happened to him?”

“The Lord forgives, and so do we,” said the priest. “At the very least, he learned to be thorough from then on.”

Yusuke tried to imagine that: burning down an entire building because of one sloppy mistake, and having nothing done in punishment. He couldn’t; in Madarame’s shack and under his care, when a single brush went missing the entire group missed meals until everything was right again. He didn’t want to think of what would happen if one of the students—or Yusuke himself—had done anything to destroy their work.

He thought of Madarame’s pleading howls. The tears dripping down his face; the snot running out of his nose. How he must have hated to seem so pathetic just to have the right to say he had never stolen a single work; how he must have hated belittling himself to make his own students take pity on him.

“It must seem strange to you,” said the priest as they passed through a door and down a set of stairs, “but because of the move, we have gained many things: new friends, new appreciations, new visitors… More people come to us now, seeking faith and blessings and even a place to belong, and it all stemmed from a single misplaced candle.”

“As if it were fate,” Yusuke said.

“God’s design,” corrected the priest, “but one can say that fate may not be the same thing. I won’t bore you with semantics at the moment, however. That’s not why you’re here, after all.”

He opened another door along a hall at the bottom of the steps; there, carefully arranged along the walls with lights placed all around as if to make them glow, were windows. Nearly a dozen stained glass pieces and all of them taller than Yusuke was, and wider than his outstretched arms.

“Take your time,” said the priest, “and when you’re done, just come back upstairs. Miss Togo and I will wait for you there.”

“Thank you,” Yusuke said, and the door clicked shut. He turned back to the rows of windows, to the events Father John and his predecessors had decided were worth immortalizing in glass: a trio of crosses atop a hill, the wood grain meticulously laid out in a delicate patchwork of tines and shards of glass no thicker than Yusuke’s finger; red-skinned, horned demons much like _oni_ watching over groups of men and women as they burned alive in a pit of fire; angels speaking to men, their wings unfurled behind them like billowing cloaks.

There was such care in each piece. It was horrendously obvious that these windows were made with a love so boundless that it threatened to tear their creators apart.

And yet, Yusuke could barely touch a paint brush. What—and who—he loved would never be seen by the world at large for centuries down the line, like so many others.

He paused at a window where the glass along the bottom had warped, the color running out of it. A young man knelt by a rock and turned a pleading gaze skyward; the tines, when Yusuke touched them, were covered in soot.

It made Yusuke think of Akira. How he’d begged and pleaded for Yuuki to stay; how distant from the past handful of years he’d been ever since Yusuke had tuned into the app. How, in his own mind, he was willing to discard the useless guardians who came to help him, forever in search of the one who would ultimately take him home.

Yusuke didn’t want to be discarded. He’d thrown his old phone away, and the app had still come back to him. He thought he had thrown painting away, but his hands itched for brushes and paints even as they shook with trepidation.

But if Akira got rid of him—if Akira decided he didn’t need Yusuke’s help after all—Akira would not come back. People on Yuuki’s forum were complaining that the app had uninstalled itself from their phones; they’d gone for joke answers, pushed for romance, failed at a critical juncture…

If Yusuke failed, he would be tossed aside, too. Akira would barely have to think about it. In fact, Akira wouldn’t have to think about it at all; the app seemed to do the work for him, most of the time, as if it sensed his rejection and cut the cord of a tenuous connection before it could hurt him further.

The thought was terrifying. Sentient phone apps were not what Yusuke wanted to think about tonight. Sentient phone apps were not what he wanted to think about, ever.

He huffed a sigh. It could have been a laugh, a single note of derision acknowledging what his life had become: a scared, lonely artist who could not paint even to save someone else’s life.

Everyone else treated the app like it was a game. Yusuke knew the truth: it was no game. Those lives other the other side of the screen weren’t fake—they were real, and each one was at stake, and it seemed only Yusuke cared enough to save them.

* * *

Sometimes Futaba had to wonder where she’d gone wrong in life. Was it her inability to like girly stuff like frilly dresses and makeup, or was it her attachment to all things sci-fi and fantasy and sentai, or was it nothing at all except Futaba herself, with a photographic memory and a desire to uncover the truth behind the weird junk of the world, like the mystery behind Yuuki’s app?

It could be a combination of all three; it could be none of them.

She bit her lip. She’d come home hoping for a reply from that coder her mom knew, and she’d gotten one. She’d expected anger and indignation—he was a very busy man, why should he help her for free, what the hell was he sending her—not… this.

 **I’d appreciate it if you didn’t waste my time with gibberish** , was his reply.

There was nothing else. Just a brush off, a turning away as she grabbed for him. She felt small and childish and absolutely stupid.

 _Why can’t he tell there’s something there?_ she thought, although it probably wasn’t important. Running through the code on Yuuki’s phone had given her enough to work out what they already knew: that Akira was light-years upon light-years away, farther away than anyone could hope to travel, farther than any manned mission could possibly hope to travel, the coordinates hidden in the code, in between strands that if she tilted her head and squinted made some kind of sense.

It was as if the maker of the app was saying, _Come and find me._

(Futaba wanted to. Space was terrifying, but they’d already proved they didn’t have to travel into space to help Akira; that was what the app was for, after all.)

She’d thought—she’d hoped—that some big shot coder with government backing would recognize that… But maybe only she could. She was the only one who’d gotten even a glance of the app’s original coding, after all.

… Right before it locked her out, at least. Just a glimpse, but that was all she needed.

She’d already recreated as much as she could. Naturally it wasn’t the whole thing—it wasn’t even close, the lines and strands meaningless taken out of the whole. If she was going to be fancy, it was like looking at a painting magnified by a hundred—there was no way to tell what it was about unless she got more info, more data.

But there was no more data. There was only that glimpse, and the app’s terminated code.

“I wonder why it hasn’t uninstalled yet,” she asked herself. Yuuki’s forum was up on one monitor; the app’s data was on another. There was a series of lines that came out **True** in Yuuki’s code—maybe that was why? Because he’d somehow done everything right, and the app was like the prize?

It would explain why, whenever some of these other idiots did something wrong, the app uninstalled itself. If Yuuki had fucked everything up, would his app have done the same, leaving Akira stranded forever?

Futaba shuddered. Yuuki had been the last one with that app. Thank God he hadn’t fucked it up, then.

She tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling: dusty light ring, wires with dust stuck to the tape holding them up. Plain and bare and boring. She could put posters up. Monkey-boy would probably help her, if she asked, or maybe Inari would be better. He wouldn’t even need a stepladder, he could already touch her ceiling with his hands.

A ping from her phone; a notification from Textter.

Kanakin: **h** **ow did you know that?**

“The same way I know everything,” she mumbled, although it wasn’t looking especially true anymore. The more she figured out, the less she realized she knew, although it didn’t take a genius to figure out that parents who exploited their kids were shit.

Another ping.

Kanakin: **how did you find out?**

“The same way I find out everything.” Except even that wasn’t foolproof anymore. She hadn’t been able to hack Yuuki’s app. She’d barely been able to crack it.

But people on Earth were subject to the same old limitations Futaba was used to dealing with. Kana’s parents were incredibly stupid, taking electronic payments for their daughter’s risque photos. Futaba had nearly hurled at some of the requests they were getting for “better” ones.

Kanakin: **are you going to tell anyone please answer me**

Futaba thought she understood why Kana wouldn’t want this to get out. But it wasn’t right. Kana had to see that; she had to know that, too. She had to know that it was wrong for her to be forced to do this.

She had to know that it was wrong for anyone to be forced to do this.

 **I want to help you** , Futaba eventually sent. **I’m on your side.**

Because Medjed helped the weak and helpless. Because Medjed knew what justice really was, and it wasn’t leaking tax information to the public or doxxing idiot celebrities.

Real, true justice made sure the bad guys never got away. Real, true justice made sure the innocent never got hurt. Real, true justice wouldn’t sit back while parents prostituted their children.

Kanakin: **how can I trust you?**

Futaba couldn’t say that it was because she was tracking Kana’s phone, and the amount of times she stood on rooftops or too near the tracks of the local train weren’t normal. If Kana died, she wouldn’t have to bear the humiliation anymore; if Kana died, her parents couldn’t dress her up in too-revealing outfits and take photos to sell to sleazy old men who would hide them from their wives.

But she knew where Kana was coming from. Futaba could be one of her parent’s customers, trying to blackmail her into worse things than she was already doing, and Kana was afraid. If any of her classmates found out, she would be worse than bullied—she would be tormented. Forget her classmates; not even her teachers would let her live it down.

The knowledge, if it ever got out, would ruin her life.

 **You can’t** , Futaba sent. It was the only thing she could say without outing herself, and she felt like Kana wouldn’t want sympathy from a former classmate, anyway. **But I want to help you.**

Kanakin: **but how can I** **TRUST** **you?**

Futaba sighed. There was no way around it. **An old classmate of yours saw your journal, once. If she hasn’t talked yet, do you think she will now?**

Kana went quiet. That was fine. Futaba hadn’t spent most of the past month wondering what she’d say, or how she’d react, or even if Futaba herself could manage to keep her cool and not sound like a lonely seventeen-year-old with next to no people skills.

(She used to be able to say that she was friendless. She couldn’t say that anymore.)

It was fine, but Futaba’s hands shook. She’d taken her meds but could hear the voices anyway: now Kana’s going to know you’re a peeping tom, Futaba; now Kana’s going to spread it around to get people to like her, Futaba; now she’s going to drop you like the ticking time bomb you are, Futaba.

A ping.

Kanakin: **isshiki?**

**Are you sure about that? You don’t sound sure.**

Kanakin: **isshiki’s the only one who saw it. you have to be her. why are you doing this?**

**Because I want to help you.**

Kanakin: **and you didn’t want to back then?**

**What could I have done? But I have tools, now. I can help you, if you want it.**

She went quiet again. Futaba hoped she was thinking it over and not running to the police, and stamped down the urge to track her phone. With just a few keystrokes, she could know everything Kana was doing, if not what she was thinking.

It had to be hard, learning that someone knew your dirtiest secrets. Futaba had shared hers with exactly one person—two, if she counted Sojiro, who needed to know because he was her guardian—outside of her therapist and doctors, and it had felt a lot like throwing up, reliving all those bad days, feeling the grime settle on her skin again. How gross she’d felt, after.

But NPC was still around. He still trusted her, after everything she’d done that would make anyone else hate her guts. He still tutored her in composition, taking half the payments Sojiro wanted to give him and a free meal from Leblanc. He’d held her, back during Golden Week, when the meds hadn’t helped much; he’d cried into her hair back in March.

She couldn’t do a lot on her own, Futaba knew. She was the best hacker in the world, but her essays sounded like pompous royalty doling out ignorance. The sheer level of jackassery made Yuuki flinch, the first time he’d read it, but he’d said, “Well, it’s not like you can’t write at all, at least.”

Which was better than nothing. Futaba hadn’t even been sure if she could remember how to write, she’d spent so long typing, but the words had come back to her eventually, even as her hand cramped with too much practice. Yuuki had watched her pick through easier, lower-level essays, and had helped her see where her arguments tended to fall apart and where she could cut out useless information.

If left on her own, Futaba would probably be on track to failing out of high school just based on her composition scores. If left on her own, Kana would never escape her parent’s awful plans for her: Futaba had gone snooping through their computers, and they were stupid to leave out an itinerary for Kana’s modeling gigs that lasted well into her thirties. Futaba had actually run to the toilet to puke after that one.

Whatever the hell was wrong with these people, Kana needed to get away from them. Now, before they made her any more dependent on them than she already was.

A ping.

Kanakin: **I dont want to do this over the net. I want to see you when you promise me you can help. I want to see if you can lie to my face or not**

“I’m not lying,” Futaba said, and sighed. Kana wouldn’t believe her, wouldn’t accept her help without this, would she?

It was good that she wasn’t so trusting, even if it made Futaba too nervous to think.

Kana wanted to meet her. Futaba didn’t want to meet her in her hometown, where the news would likely get back to her parents. They’d find out, or they’d accuse her of telling and then make her explain, and that would be the end of it.

But she couldn’t suggest a place. Kana might become even more suspicious than she already was, and not even show up. **Where, then?**

But Kana didn’t answer. Futaba waited for a long time, then settled into bed.

Sleep came, after a while, and it was as restless as Futaba’s own mind, spinning around on itself, circling back to one old thought or another and sticking there like glue. But there was one thing even her subconscious knew: help would come, if she only sought it out.

If only it didn’t seem so far away.


	5. June, Part Two

Futaba practically called Yuuki up screaming one morning, shrieking out that her mother was finally coming back to Japan—was on a plane to Japan, right at that very moment—and was going to be landing that night.

“Uh, okay,” Yuuki said, willing the ringing in his ears to go away.

“Sojiro’s going to pick her up from the airport and he’s asking if I want to go too but I don’t know if I actually want to go or not or if I should throw some kind of party—do you think my mom would like a welcome-back-and-I’m-glad-you’re-not-dead party?—or if I should just wait at home for her to get here but if I do that it’s going to be awkward but I think it’s going to be awkward anyway—”

“Futaba,” he said, dragging himself out of his covers and wondering where his shirt had gone in the night, “slow down. Breathe.”

Oh, there it was, under the bed. He reached for it. “But what do I _do_?” Futaba asked, nearly wailing. “I haven’t seen her in years! She even stopped emailing me a couple of months in! How am I supposed to act when she gets here?”

“Well, don’t mention becoming a world-renowned hacker,” Yuuki said, juggling his phone while he put his shirt on. He’d had a dream about Akira, that they were singing together and ushering in an age of peace and harmony, and his skin still tingled with the residue of power.

If only real life was that easy.

“What if she wants me to move in with her? I like living in Sojiro’s place! It’s comfortable!”

Yuuki looked around at his tiny apartment—actually only a bit bigger than Futaba’s room, toilet and bathroom included—and couldn’t disagree. This had become his space in a matter of months: those were his textbooks scattered across his desk; those were his dishes air-drying by the sink; those were his clothes hanging in the closet. “You do turn eighteen in February. Maybe she won’t make you; maybe she’s going to take a while picking out a place.”

He felt like they’d already had this conversation. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

“If she doesn’t decide to just live in a capsule hotel,” Futaba muttered, “or at her lab. Again.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Mom was just never home, before,” Futaba said. “And when she was, she had work to do. She brought it home with her. She always had files, everywhere, and she was always on her computer. I had to beg her to cook real food instead of going to get convenience store takeout, or to go to the park.”

Yuuki couldn’t remember ever having to do that. Maybe it was because his parents shared the responsibility of raising him; one or the other was always around, until he got older. Then it became a gamble as to who would be home that night or if anyone would be; then Kamoshida happened.

“I don’t want her to insist I have to live with her if she’s just going to be the same,” Futaba finished. “Sojiro’s a lot better than she was. Even when I had it bad, he made sure there was dinner for me. Home-cooked stuff, not dry onigiri. And he talks to me, too, and makes sure I take my meds, and he doesn’t act like I can’t understand what everyone’s talking about, the same way she did sometimes.”

“You’re older now,” Yuuki said. “There are things a seventeen-year-old will understand better than a seven-year-old, you know.”

“I know that! He just… never did that. At all. If I asked what everyone at Mom’s office parties was talking about, he’d tell me. He’d find a computer and we’d look at Tikipedia articles together. He said I’d find out one way or another, and that it was better if an adult was around to make sure I understood it.”

“And so you wouldn’t get in trouble, probably.”

He could hear her grin. “Yeah, probably. Anyway—what should I do?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. If you don’t think you can face her at first, a party might be better. You can invite us. I’d like to meet your mom. Plus, we’d be a good buffer from things going south as soon as she sees you.”

“You’d do that for me?”

“Yeah,” he said. If he felt his cheek, some days he could still feel the handprint his own mother had left on his face and the small welts her nails had raised. He’d been devastated by that slap.

Futaba would be worse. Her meds might not be enough.

“Do you think Sojiro will let us throw a party?”

“He hasn’t said no yet, has he?” They’d had so many parties at Leblanc last year it was a wonder the place had stayed in business, though if Boss was going to be picking Futaba’s mother up from the airport, Leblanc wouldn’t be open very long today anyway. “But is she even going back to Boss’s place? You don’t know if she has a hotel or not.”

“I might have heard them talking on the phone last week about it. Sojiro said she can crash here for a few days, and then he started airing out the guest bedding.”

“Alright, then,” he decided. “We’ll throw your mom a party. What time is her flight coming in?”

“Oh, uh—”

And Futaba lost herself to the details: whether she wanted takeout or curry (probably both); whether she wanted cake or not; what time they should all show up, if Yusuke and Ryuji wanted to be there. Yuuki shot off texts to the both of them while Futaba looked up fast catering places; Ryuji seemed pissed that he’d gotten woken up at five in the morning, and Yusuke didn’t answer, probably dead asleep.

Yuuki didn’t fault him for that. He’d heard the rumors about art students in college and didn’t begrudge Yusuke the rest he clearly needed; all those hours of studio time must wear even someone like Yusuke down eventually.

He settled back when Futaba hung up, too eager to get her day started to even think about a catnap before she had to leave for school. Yuuki was considering it; his eyes had that slight burn to them, and stuck whenever he blinked.

He checked his alarms and crawled back into bed. If Wakaba Isshiki was anything like her daughter, Yuuki was going to need as much rest as he could get.

* * *

If Futaba thought her planning was a secret, she was sorely mistaken. Sojiro Sakura could hear her through her door, chattering away to one of her friends on the phone.

Most parents would question why their daughter was up at five in the morning planning a surprise party. Sojiro was not that kind of parent.

Instead, he went downstairs and started breakfast a little early. Sliced up fruit and put vegetables in her eggs and, when she finally came downstairs grinning from ear-to-ear, handed her a glass of milk and pretended he had no idea about her party.

It would be worth it to see the look on her face when she saw the look on Wakaba’s face.

Wakaba. He thought of the documents still locked in his safe and his eggs went sour in his mouth; Futaba still didn’t know a thing about them. Wakaba barely knew about them.

How could she, when she’d made it perfectly clear where her priorities lay?

Futaba scarfed down breakfast, took her morning pills, and was out the door before he knew it. Sojiro cleaned up, left out some food for Futaba’s cat, then headed out himself—the airport wasn’t that far, but traffic in Tokyo was always awful and parking at the airport was even worse. He could already see himself driving around in circles all day, waiting for Wakaba’s flight to arrive.

Wakaba. The documents. He sighed.

He wound up doing just that: driving in circles, waiting for a spot to open up in the airport parking lot and finding none. Stopping for lunch at a restaurant nearby where the prices were so inflated they made him hesitate before his stomach complained. Driving some more.

But finally, Wakaba called him. Her flight was in, she was getting her bag, and she would meet him at such-and-such gate.

And she did. For a second, while she was getting in the car, he thought he saw that Sakamoto boy with a girl with natural blonde hair—but then he blinked and both of them were gone.

“It feels so strange to be back, after all this time,” Wakaba said, as if five years abroad was an eternity. Maybe it was, to her; but she dashed that thought with: “Although it seems like only yesterday I left. The skyline’s still the same as ever.”

“Right,” he said, and eased the car back onto the road. There was a bus in his rearview, blocking off half the street with its bulk, and he saw Sakamoto sitting next to a window, his hair like a beacon.

Futaba hadn’t mentioned anyone else coming back. Maybe it wasn’t anyone she knew, then.

Ah, well. He’d find out later, wouldn’t he?

Wakaba was silent for most of the ride back, dozing in her seat and likely still nauseous from the trip. Sojiro found he didn’t mind this; it gave him time to think about how he’d go about breaking news of the documents to Futaba and her mother. About whether he should tell them at all.

But Futaba was just as absent-minded as Wakaba was. If left to her own devices she would forget to take her medicine, and then she’d relapse and get sick again.

He didn’t think he could take another of those phone calls. Thinking she was safe and sound in her room, her little bubble, and then hearing her ask him—

(“Sojiro, do you hate me? Do you really think I should die?”

His blood ran so cold he wouldn’t be surprised to find that it had frozen in his veins. It was hard to even breathe. “Futaba, no. Of course I don’t. What’s going on? Are you alright?”

“Sojiro, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Everybody’s leaving and it’s my fault. Everybody’s leaving and they say I should, too.”

“Well, don’t,” he said, sounding somehow calm despite his racing heart and the way air kept catching in his lungs. “Futaba. You’re going to be alright. I’m coming to get you. Don’t do anything, understand?”

She sobbed instead of answering. He barely looked back at his shop, empty as usual, before he was racing down the alley. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t get the keys in the door; his legs shook so badly he didn’t dare take his shoes off, out of fear of slipping on the stairs.

Besides, Futaba needed him. Futaba needed him even though her door was closed and she wouldn’t open it, wouldn’t answer except to sob brokenly, the noise an echo in his ear from the one right in front of him. He’d pounded on it until his fists ached, begging her to let him in.

But she didn’t. She’d never let him in before; why would she now, after all this time?

But she was crying, on the other side of that door. The damn door, the one Sojiro swore he’d never open, because her privacy was one of the things he cared about. It was the kind of thing Sojiro had only told her to assuage some of the nerves she’d been getting about moving: Sojiro wouldn’t snoop through her things, wouldn’t walk in her room, wouldn’t do anything she felt he didn’t need to. Futaba was a smart kid and a rather mature one; at ten, she could already do her own laundry, and wash dishes, and cook simple meals.

At ten, that was just the kind of daughter her mother needed her to be.

Add in the fact that Futaba had somehow gotten roped into an assassination scheme, and Sojiro had been worried. Still was worried. She’d said she was fine but he’d hoped she would talk to him, eventually, about what she’d seen and heard and gone through that day.

But she hadn’t. Now she was breaking down on the other side of a door Sojiro had sworn he wouldn’t open. He hadn’t wanted to be the kind of parent who didn’t take his kid’s wishes into account, but Futaba was crying, and wanted to die, and making her see that he didn’t want her to was all he could think about.

He threw himself at it, his phone still by his ear. He could hear Futaba crying, sobbing out names he couldn’t recognize over the pounding of his own body as it hit, over and over again.

The door was thin and flimsy, and Sojiro wasn’t young anymore. Sojiro wasn’t the man he used to be, trying to win over the heart of any pretty lady that caught his eye; there was only one person he wanted to get through to anymore, and it was the girl on the other side of the door.

So when the door gave and he crashed to the floor, cushioned by a bag of trash that he didn’t want to know how long had sat there, and Futaba shrieked in that odd echoing way of the phone call—he was surprised. Surprised that the door gave in, surprised that Futaba was staring at him in shock as he sprang to his feet and shoved his phone in his pocket, surprised that he enveloped her in an embrace he’d long told himself would never happen.

She shook. Her breath came too quick, too fast. “Futaba,” he said, right by her ear so she knew it was him. “It’s alright. You’re going to be fine.”

“No,” Futaba said. “I’m not.”

“Futaba—”

“I’m not fine!” she shrieked, leaving his ears ringing. “Mona’s not fine! Mom’s not fine! They’re right there, they’re looking at me! If they’re there and they’re not supposed to be, that means they’re dead! They’ve left me!”

Sojiro chanced a glance over his shoulder. Nothing and no one was there, not even Futaba’s weird cat, still trapped at the vet’s. “Futaba,” he tried again.

“There are two of you,” she said, her voice a high, scared whine. “Who’s—who’s the real Sojiro? Are you the real Sojiro?”

“Futaba,” he said again, “listen to me: I’m going to take you downstairs, then to the car. I think something’s wrong. We’ll go get some help for—for whatever’s happening, alright? Don’t listen to what those—those ghosts are telling you. Listen to me. Okay?”

“You don’t want me to die?”

He tried to picture it: Futaba, dead by her own hand. A little piece of Wakaba forever lost to the world; a little girl forever grieving her own lonely heart. A little girl held captive and tormented by her own mind until she broke.

If she died, Wakaba would kill him. If she died, Sojiro might as well die, too.

“Of course I don’t,” he said. It came out sharper than he meant it to as he struggled to his feet. His shoulder throbbed and ached and he could feel Futaba’s weight trying to pull it off. “I don’t want you to die. I would _never_ , understand? Never.”

Futaba only whimpered in his ear. She was so heavy, for a girl who barely ate.

Responsibility was so heavy.)

… He couldn’t go through that again. Couldn’t bear it to hear that Futaba wasn’t happy back with her mother, who would no doubt go straight back to her research tomorrow morning. Couldn’t bear it to hear that Futaba wasn’t eating again, too absorbed in her projects to remember. He finally had her eating home-cooked meals instead of noodles she could pop in the microwave. She’d go straight back to them the day she moved back in with her mother, because they were easy and cheap and didn’t expire. She could hoard them the way she had hoarded her trash.

And he would have no choice but to watch her slowly kill herself that way, with one bad meal after another. Sojiro had her eating salads with dinner. Futaba hated tomatoes with a passion but still stuffed them in her mouth and chewed, despite the look on her face. Sojiro had her eating eggs with spinach in them, and was putting fruit in her lunches. No store-bought bread for Futaba, not while Sojiro was around.

Sometimes he wondered what Wakaba was eating, then remembered that Futaba had learned it from someone, and that someone had to be her mother.

“Wakaba,” he said, when they reached the house, “there’s something I’d like to talk to you and Futaba about. Tomorrow, though, when you aren’t tired.”

“I thought you gave up years ago,” Wakaba said. She stared out the window at the tiny alley, the tiny street, his tiny house. Still a house, though. Better than an apartment any day, because it was his and his alone.

Years ago he would have asked Wakaba to live with him. It wouldn’t have had to be forever; he had only wanted to spend as much time with this beautiful, brilliant woman as possible. But the beautiful, brilliant woman he once knew was gone, replaced with a woman who could barely be bothered to call her own daughter. To cook for her. To take her out to the park or the movies or shopping, the way other parents did. Wakaba wasn’t perfect, and Sojiro knew it, now.

It changed the way he loved her, skewed it sideways and made him see every single flaw. Wakaba was a mother, sure, but she wasn’t a good one. Was probably never going to be a good one.

(Sometimes it made him wonder how she had wanted Futaba in the first place. Why she wouldn’t just do away with an unwanted child in secret, before anyone had to know. She had the connections to. But she hadn’t.)

“I did,” he said, because his love was twisted, now. Spurned one too many times. He loved her, but she didn’t love him back. Couldn’t love him back. Seemed to love her research more than her own flesh and blood. There was nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what Futaba needed. “That’s not what this is about. I’ll—I’ll explain tomorrow.”

She looked at him then, black eyes searching. “Well, alright. There’s something I need to talk about with Futaba, too, actually. I’m surprised she didn’t come with you, although I’m glad she wasn’t here to chatter the whole ride home.”

Futaba could be quiet, when she was engrossed in some problem or another. He’d bought a book of logic puzzles online and read one out to her for long car rides or rides on the train, and she would go silent as a clam, her mind racing for a solution. Sometimes, however, when she just went quiet, it meant the voices were back. It meant something she’d said—or something someone else had said—was bothering her.

Sojiro would take a chattering Futaba over a silent one any day. Sojiro would let her walk him through every episode of that Featherman show she loved so much if it meant she wasn’t thinking about dying.

“Well, she is back in school,” he said, instead of anything else. “Attendance policies aren’t what they used to be, let me tell you that.”

“So she did go back, did she?” Wakaba asked, as if he hadn’t told her so in an email six months ago. She dragged her bag out of the car. “That’s good. I was worried she wouldn’t. She’s so smart, Sojiro, it would be a waste for her not to.”

“Right,” he said, leaving out that Futaba was already polishing her formidable hacking skills (for her future) and making video games (because that Sakamoto boy told her to. Granted, he helped), and probably wouldn’t want for money even if she never went to college and got a degree.

“And think of the friends she’ll make!” Wakaba said, setting her bag down in the foyer. “Oh, I do hope she’s making friends! The kids all used to bully her, you remember, right?”

It was a good thing Futaba wasn’t home to potentially hear that. “I do.”

Wakaba frowned at him. His phone pinged. At this late hour, it could only be Futaba; if she wasn’t home yet, that meant she was in Leblanc. “Is something wrong, Sojiro?” Wakaba asked, as his pone pinged again. “You’re not very talkative today.”

He shook his head. His mind was so full of thoughts on how to break the documents to them that he’d ignored her. Perfect. “Ah,” he said, searching for an excuse, “it’s just—I might have left something at the cafe. I told you about that, didn’t I?”

“The cafe?” she asked, as if he hadn’t told her he started it shortly before she left for America. As if she hadn’t given him the curry recipe he used every damn day. “ _Your_ cafe?”

“ _My_ cafe,” he said. “You want to see? Stretch your legs a bit? It’s just down the street.”

She hummed, thinking it over. He felt for the cafe keys in his pocket; Futaba didn’t have the spare, but she and her friends knew where Sojiro kept it. His phone pinged. He checked it.

Futaba: **please just get her to the cafe I promise its nothing bad I swear**

He swallowed down the urge to laugh. Futaba was about as subtle as a speeding train, but maybe that was just because he knew what she was up to.

“Well, alright,” Wakaba finally said. Her eyes glimmered with mirth.

Used to be the sight of an amused Wakaba would send his heart through a rollercoaster. Now, he just offered a crooked smile back, the one that had melted more hearts than he cared to ever count, and gave a grand, silly gesture to the still-open door. “After you,” he said.

Wakaba laughed but went.

Well, it was something, at least.

* * *

Of all the people Ryuji hadn’t expected to see while waiting for Ann at the airport, it was Boss. He’d gotten a single glimpse of the man with a woman with black hair in a bob cut before Ann tugged him away and onto a bus. She fiddled with her hoodie string as she sat down, her overnight bag overly-large in her lap.

“Thanks for doing this,” she said, softly, her Japanese stuttering.

“No prob,” he said back, with his awful English accent. It got her laughing, at least, snorting at the way he hadn’t gotten any better at pronunciation in the past year and a half.

It was a win. Screw classes for the day; if he got to see Ann smile like that for the next couple of hours, it would be worth the make-up work.

She groaned, loudly. Several people were staring at her hair; several people weren’t, but those were tourists, with Japanese-to-English dictionaries open on their laps. Not very many people on the bus were blonde. Not very many people on the bus were as drop-dead gorgeous as Ann. “I just can’t wait for a proper crepe,” she said. “It’s all I’ve been thinking about all day! Crepes! Chocolate crepes! With chocolate cream, and strawberries!”

“Extra large,” he said, at the same time she did. She snorted with laughter again. “Your dentist must make tons off of you, Ann. I can’t even imagine.”

“I take care of my teeth,” she said. “I take great care of my teeth! I’ve only had one cavity so far in my life, so don’t jinx me, Sakamoto!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said with a grin. “So. You’ve got a while before the next entrance exams. What’re you gonna do, aside from study and eat too many crepes?”

“Visit Shiho,” she said, without even thinking about it. “Do some more modeling work. Hang with you guys. If you don’t mind, that is.”

“Nah, we don’t mind,” Ryuji told her.

Then he remembered: the party for Futaba’s mom was tonight. He hadn’t sent back a reply to Yuuki yet, and knowing Yuuki, the guy was probably on pins and needles by now, worrying over whether Ryuji was going to show.

“Actually, can you give me a sec? I forgot about somethin’ they were planning tonight.”

Ann gave him a brilliant smile. “Oh, sure. I should text Shiho, too, to let her know I’m back.”

They turned to their phones. Ryuji’s hadn’t gone off since that early morning text, which meant everything was being coordinated through phone calls. He sent a simple message to Futaba, because this was her mom and her party and he didn’t want to crash it with Ann in tow.

Futaba’s lightning fingers replied back seconds later. **Fine with me** , she sent.

 **Cool** , he sent back. **Need any last-minute party stuff?**

 **Nope we’re good.** A picture of a couple of Leblanc’s booth tables stuffed to overflowing with food, none of which Boss would want in his precious cafe except when they threw a party. Futaba had, for some reason, gotten a bucket of fries from Big Bang Burger, and grease stained the bottom of it; someone had shoved a bunch of napkins underneath to protect the table. There was a cake with vanilla frosting and the words ‘Welcome Home!’ in chocolate piping that they’d probably gotten from Junes, and a couple packages of cookies, and a fruit and vegetable tray. Soda and juice and plain and sparkling water and green tea in bottles. Ryuji thought he saw the familiar stripes of a TFC bucket and drooled at the thought of fried chicken.

Another picture: Yusuke trying to arrange the food so it looked good, a cherry tomato pinched between his fingers and halfway to his mouth.

Another one: Yuuki at the stove stirring a pot of curry, one hand on his rings as he worked. The rice cooker in the back was giving off a thin trickle of steam, and there were empty paper bags visible on the counter.

Another one: Futaba grinning and giving a peace sign, her glasses catching Leblanc’s dim lighting. Behind her were stacks of plates and plastic cups, the ones Boss had bought and stored after their first party. They were supposed to be in a cabinet she couldn’t reach, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t bug Yusuke to get them down for her.

 **Alright** , Ryuji sent. **See you then.**

Futaba sent him a thumb’s up emoji, and he shoved his phone back in his pocket and turned back to Ann. She was still texting Shiho, and as he watched, her face lit up with laughter. She brushed her hair—for once not tied up in her usual ponytails but let down with a barrette to hold her bangs back, curling around her ears and spilling down her back and chest—behind one ear, the jewel in her barrette shining in the sun from the window like crystal-clear water. She grinned.

Ann was a girl full of smiles, he realized. Sad ones and strained ones and ones full of joy and ease. They reached her eyes, too, making them dance or swim or burn with fire.

His heart stuttered in his chest, jumping at the mere sight of her on this crowded bus headed into Tokyo. Ann shone like the sun in a sea of gloom and darkness.

Shit. Every breath seemed to catch in his lungs; he turned away before she noticed him staring and shut his jaw with a very final-sounding click of teeth. He almost bit his tongue.

Back at Shujin, Ann had been nothing more than his classmate since middle school, the weird-looking foreign girl who talked to him sometimes, the one everyone called a pretty whore when she started going out with Kamoshida.

Ann was past pretty, now. Ann was drop-dead gorgeous. If they’d been walking Ryuji would have walked straight into a pole, and he hated that gag the most whenever he saw it.

But—it was _Ann_. Weird foreign girl with her pale eyes and even paler hair. Weird foreign girl having to bring her parent’s photo albums with her on the first day of school so she could show bitchy, snotty teachers and student council members that her hair color was natural. Weird foreign girl with what might be a crush on her best friend. Weird foreign girl who had loaned him train fare after their school trip. He hadn’t even had to ask.

He dared another glance. Ann, leaning back in her seat, reading some long message Shiho had sent her, smile still tugging at her lips. Ryuji wanted to tangle his fingers in her hair and pull her close and kiss her, bus full of people be damned. Shiho be damned. Ann’s damn feelings be damned.

He turned away again, trying to breathe until his heart stopped racing and wound up staring at himself in the window, Ann’s head half-visible behind his wide-eyed stare. He wanted to move until he could see her without her noticing.

He didn’t. Fuck, that would be creepy as hell. Ryuji wasn’t going to stoop that low just to look at her. Ryuji wouldn’t stoop that low to look at anybody; instead he focused on the road as it creeped by: the guy in the car two lanes over shouting during a call, one hand flailing as he tried in vain to make his point, the glow of his dashboard system winking in and out of sight; the woman trying not to fall asleep at the wheel with her kids in the backseat fighting over a stuffed animal, her husband turned around in his seat to shout at them; another guy tapping his steering wheel with a girl sleeping in the passenger seat, her bare feet propped up on the dash as her boyfriend drove.

When he didn’t feel like he was running a damn race anymore, he turned away from the window. Ann stared at him, out the glass, as if wondering what had him so transfixed, and his heart fucking leaped again. “Everything okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said, and swallowed the lump in his throat. Fuck. “Uh—‘taba’s having a party tonight. Her mom’s coming home, ‘n she wanted to do something for her. I got invited. I asked if you could come, if you wanted to—uh, want to.”

Shit, it was like someone had tied a hundred-pound weight to his tongue. It refused to work.

“But it’s a party for her mom, right?” Ann asked, with a worried frown. “I don’t know if I want to crash it. I can just head straight to my hotel.”

“‘taba bought way too much food for six people, okay,” he said. Mostly because Futaba on a good day was a damn glutton, and mostly because Yusuke on a good day was a damn glutton, and mostly because she probably wanted there to be enough. It was a party. What kind of party ran out of food? “And she said it’s cool if you go. Yuuki and Yusuke’ll be there, too.”

She raised brows at that. Shit, he’d never told her they were all on a first-name basis now, had he?

“Uh. There’ll be cake? And cookies?”

“Well, okay, I guess,” Ann said, relenting at the thought of sweets. She’d probably had cookies on the plane. One day he was going to fear for her, but it wasn’t today, when just looking at her made him want to kiss her, claim her, mark her as his.

Stupid, shitty thought. She wasn’t a _thing_. She wasn’t a trophy to hang off his arm. He wasn’t Kamoshida, either.

“Trust me, they’ll be happy to see you. And ‘taba—well, she might not talk to ya at first, but she’ll warm up after a while. Ask her about Featherman; she’ll love that.”

“Featherman, huh?” Her lips twitched, the smile returning. “Wow, I haven’t seen that in forever. I think I watched a couple of episodes after that news segment we saw—you know, the one about those missing kids?”

Ren and Goro. How could Ryuji forget? “Yeah. I did, too.”

“Did they ever find out what happened? Did they find them?”

_Did you look into it, like we talked about doing? Did you find anything?_

He couldn’t talk about Yuuki’s phone app on the bus. He thought he saw someone playing the new one as they found their seats, Akira’s worried face filling the screen, his eyes strangely dulled from the blazing fires they’d held when he was still connected to Yuuki. Ryuji settled for: “It’s complicated. Ak—Amamiya’s folks called off the search a couple weeks ago. They didn’t say much, just that they had hope that eventually he’d come home. Lotta people said it was about time; lotta people said they couldn’t give up like that. Goro’s mom hasn’t done the same thing yet, but people are worried she might. They’ve been finding a lot of missing kids since it all started, and they don’t want it to stop.”

“Are the kids okay?”

Ryuji shrugged. “Dunno. Probably not.”

He definitely wouldn’t be if he’d been caught up in half the shit those kids were in. Pedophile rings; trafficking rings; organs and slaves and mail-order brides, even the boys. Athletes who had to win every fight and race or they were hung and left in Aokigahara. Non-voluntary drug tests for new medicines. He’d heard some kid had been brainwashed into being an assassin.

Ann wasn’t smiling now, probably thinking the same things. Thinking how close she’d been to becoming one of them, even if it had been through her own will; anything given under threat of something else being taken away wasn’t willingly given, and Ann had to know that. Shiho’s group therapist had told them all so, many, many times over.

He tugged his phone out of his pocket. Sent her a message: **I’ll tell you the rest later. It really is complicated.**

Her mouth tugged and tugged as she read it over, never quite smiling, always settling back into that frown Ryuji was wishing he could kiss away.

He’d always wished he’d fall in love—but not like this, on a crowded bus with a couple of sweaty tourists in the back stinking the place up. Not like this, while they were talking about Futaba and her mom and the party, and all the bad things about the world that were slowly being uncovered right before their very eyes.

Ryuji’s ma was going to have a field day with this, once she found out. She was going to give him date money like he wasn’t a college student earning his own cash. She was going to want to help him style his hair like he hadn’t been doing it since his first day of high school. She was going to ask, “What’s she like? Or he, if it’s a he, Ryuji, dear,” because his ma wanted to be inclusive, even though Ryuji had never given her reasons to worry he might be gay—

(Maybe it was just something moms worried about. Ryuji didn’t know. Yuuki’s certainly wasn’t a good example, was she?)

—and Ryuji was going to have to explain about Ann, and Kamoshida, and the fact that Ann looked like a foreigner and that was the only reason Kamoshida had wanted a piece of her at all. His ma would love her anyway. His ma would invite her over for too-sweet tea and stale cookies and would want to talk to her about anything and everything and probably just about Ryuji. She’d finally have the chance to show off all of those baby pictures. She’d probably ask for Ann’s, too, so she could coo over them.

 **Okay,** Ann finally sent. **But sometime soon, okay? The suspense might kill me!**

Kill _her_? Ann was about to kill _him_ with nothing more than herself and her knee pressed against his in the tight bus seats. His heart beat so fast he thought it would pop. He didn’t remember a time when it had raced this hard, hammering so hard his ribs might crack—not even during his races in middle school, when the scouts were there; not even when Kamoshida finally pushed him over the edge and he realized it was the completely wrong thing to do—but it was, and part of him wondered whether she could hear it or not.

Breathless, wordless, his tongue too thick to move and his throat a damn desert, he nodded. Sometime soon he’d explain all the crazy shit she’d missed. Sometime soon he’d beg her to believe it, and not to go running off to anybody else with it all.

Ann grinned, leaning back in her seat. Said something about wanting a nap and shut her eyes.

Ryuji went back to the road and his phone and tried not to search for her reflection in the glass.

* * *

Shiori Yamamoto never liked to plug her ears up with headphones. Not both of them, anyway—how could she tell where anything was if there was no way to hear it?—but nobody knew, because her hair hid any telltale signs. People saw the wires and thought she was engrossed in music, or a podcast, and left her alone. People saw the wires and thought she couldn’t hear and talked, loud enough for, say, an entire bus of people to hear.

Shiori liked listening, most of the time. It was how she found out about her new favorite cake shop, and how she found out the third-year she’d had a crush on had a girlfriend. It was how she found out one of her teachers got married nearly two weeks before it was announced to the class, and how she found out which of the new book releases was worth her money.

So she kept one ear on the conversations around her—something about a party, something about a project at work, something about some hotel reservations—and one ear on her game, the jumble of technobabble meaningless. Ionasal was saying something about a fancy tube, and how they had to go stop the others, even though Shiori had been the one to drag them there.

Well, it was a weird game. She kept asking around online, trying to find the developer, but hadn’t found much at all—just an obscure forum, the information sparse and the design pretty barren and the admin more reclusive than her shut-in cousin.

(The fact that Ionasal looked like her crush had nothing to do with it. Nope, nothing at all; if anyone asked she was here to coo over Goro’s pouting baby cheeks. It was pretty easy. He did it a _lot_.)

Someone on the bus mentioned missing kids and Shiori felt the hush that descended over them all. You couldn’t go two steps anymore without hearing about missing kids these days; Shiori had walked by a former Diet member giving speeches in Shibuya square last month and wondered why all these politicians could pretend to care about a bunch of missing kids.

(But if they were so easy to find, she’d thought, they wouldn’t be missing, would they?)

In the hush, despite the way he lowered his voice, she still heard the guy say: “It’s complicated. Amamiya’s folks called off the search a couple weeks ago.”

Amamiya. She’d heard that name before. Last… winter. During the elections, when they were supposed to be studying for finals, her classmates were all chattering about the Amamiya boy.

What had he looked like, again? Messy, and very Japanese—dark hair, dark eyes, she thought.

Great. Now it was going to bug her.

“… give up like that. Goro’s mom hasn’t done the same thing yet—”

Goro. Like the kid in her game, his glare subdued by his childish face.

Now she was getting the idea that she’d heard of them both before. It had to be last winter, around the elections; some of the girls with nieces and nephews or much younger siblings in her classes had said it wasn’t right, for such a young kid to go missing. What if it was theirs, next? What in the world would they do?

 _“You know, I appreciate the break, but we should really keep climbing, shouldn’t we?”_ Ionasal asked her—told her, more like, his tone leaving no room for argument—surrounded by unyielding steel walls and looking incredibly harried, his hair even messier than usual. He bit his lip and tugged at a fistful of hair, fingers catching in snarls and snags. All that magic he was using caused quite a tailwind, and Ionasal was the only one around to be ruffled by it.

Shiori tugged her brother’s sleeve. No good; he was out cold in the seat beside her, his suit jacket rumpled and wrinkled around the elbows. Well, that was fine. She’d seen which pocket he had stuffed his phone into and tugged it out, and praised all the gods that her brother was an idiot who made his hire date at his job his password.

She took a picture and sent it to herself. If she was wrong, then she was wrong.

But if she was right, and Ionasal was tugging at some string of memory Shiori could barely recall… Well, she wasn’t sure what would happen, or whether it would be good or bad or anything in between.

The world was strange, after all. Just like her game.

She shoved her brother’s phone back in his pocket and settled in for the ride.

* * *

Naturally Ann liked the cake, and the cookies, and the curry Yuuki had whipped up; apparently decent curry was hard to find in the States, and Ann had gone so long without that she got up and scooped the leftover sauce out of the pot and dunked a few of the remaining cookies in it.

Ryuji gaped at her. “What?” she asked.

“Uh, nothing,” he said, and made himself look away. Boss and Yusuke were discussing a fresh coat of paint on the outside of the store, and Yusuke’s face looked oddly pinched as they talked. Weird; but then, he’d admitted to trying to paint again recently and said that it wasn’t going as well as he wanted it to. Nerves, probably.

Nerves would get the better of everybody.

Yuuki was heading back into the kitchen to grab the curry pot. He was probably as disgusted with Ann as Ryuji was, but they both knew better than to say anything to make her mad and make Futaba anymore wound up than she already was, shifting between picking at her food and wolfing it down in between chattering nonstop to her mom, who sat at the bar looking vaguely amused.

Ryuji would like her more if she didn’t look like she was putting up with Futaba’s party, if she didn’t look like something big was going to go down the second everyone was gone. if her hair wasn’t cut so damn severely he could probably use it as a straightedge.

Futaba must have taken her medicine before the party started, because by the time he and Ann had arrived it had been seven-thirty and Wakaba Isshiki was already seated at the bar, a bottle of green tea in one manicured hand and a haphazard pile of food on a plate in the other. She eyed the both of them the same way everyone else did: with a slight sense of disdain that only evaporated when Futaba rushed to introduce them, faltering on Ann’s name and the blonde waves of her hair and the bright blues of her eyes.

Ann had smiled, blinding and bright, and said, “It’s nice to meet you!” in her rusty Japanese. The words were coming back to her, and her sparse video calls with Shiho had made sure that she didn’t forget them completely; Wakaba had just smiled, small and tight in comparison, and said, “It’s a pleasure. Call me Wakaba, please. I’ve gotten used to it.” Futaba had decided that hiding behind the pile of food on the tables—instead of in the attic, which he guessed was a step up—was a good idea, and had watched the whole exchange carefully.

Ann had seen her, waved and smiled, and then sat down in the farthest booth to let her adjust. Ryuji had brought her her first plate, mostly everything sweet on the table and a drumstick out of the TFC bucket, and that had been that: Futaba had crawled out after a while, and Ann was free to fill her plate up with whatever she wanted—which was yet more sweet shit with a side of real food—and, most importantly, Wakaba didn’t ask how her daughter knew a foreigner and a delinquent.

She probably didn’t care. Ryuji didn’t blame her.

Now the party was winding down: Yuuki packed up the leftover vegetables off the tray to take home since no one else wanted them; Yusuke was eyeing the fry bucket next to him as he worked; Ryuji knew there were still some left, and wondered whether he should shove the bucket into Yusuke’s hands or eat them himself. Everything else, aside from the drinks, was gone, and Futaba was at the sink washing whatever they could reuse.

Boss stared at the trash. Yusuke finally got up and finished off the fries and started piling as much cardboard as he could into the bucket.

“Huh,” Ann said, under her breath.

“What?” Ryuji asked.

“Hm,” she said, staring sleepily at the two boys cleaning up. “I’ll tell you later. It’s nothing important. Probably.”

“Probably? What’s that mean?”

“Just that it might be important or it might not be, that’s all,” was the response, and she grinned at him. Smiling even though there were cookie crumbs and cake frosting stuck in her teeth.

“Speaking of important, actually,” said Wakaba, one finger running along the rim of the cup of coffee Boss had made them both, “there’s something I need to ask Futaba.”

Futaba paused in her washing, turning to look over her shoulder. Her glasses were fogged from the steam from the sink. “Y-yeah, Mom?”

“That data you sent Kirchbach to analyze—just what was that about? I didn’t think you would ever pull a prank like that. He nearly came to me screaming about how my daughter was wasting his time.”

Futaba jerked back to her dishes. Her empty bottles and plastic plates and cups, her hair dripping over her shoulders and into the sink, the ends wet with bubbles. “It wasn’t a prank,” she said. Ryuji could hear her holding back tears.

“Then why would you send him that—that junk data? Futaba, please tell me.”

For all that her mother was calm and collected, there was an edge to her tone, like steel. Unbending and stern, as she took in her daughter’s quivering back as Futaba fought off tears.

Ryuji grit his teeth, ready to race across the room.

Yuuki dumped the vegetable tray in the sink, cutting off her view. “It wasn’t junk data,” he said.

“Yeah,” Ryuji said, realizing that if Yuuki was getting pissed and defensive it was about Akira. Akira’s data—Akira’s app. “It wasn’t junk data. Don’t call it that.”

“If it wasn’t, then what was it?” Wakaba asked.

Yusuke rolled a piece of potato skin in his fingers. He didn’t seem likely to jump in at all—Ryuji knew it still bothered him to defy the adults around him—but said, “More than junk. A work of art, born of sheer desperation, alighted to the far reaches of the known universe in order to—”

“Stop it!” Futaba cried, her hands splashing. Bubbles flew up; some of them hit the TV. Yuuki flinched but stood his ground. “Stop it, shut up! I want to tell her!”

“The universe?” Wakaba asked, and Ryuji could hear her raised brow. So Futaba hadn’t picked it up from Boss after all; she’d gotten it from her mother. “You mean to tell me that data came from space?”

“Space?” Ann asked. “What’s going on?”

“The missing kids got abducted by aliens!” Futaba shouted, as blunt as a hammer. Ryuji didn’t know of any other way to put it, but that was probably the best one, and it was the truth.

Too bad nobody in their right mind would believe it. Wakaba practically snorted. Boss looked incredibly uncomfortable. “So now you’re going to sit there and make up conspiracy theories, Futaba?” She turned to Boss, who at least had the spine to look her in the eye as she said: “Just what have you been letting her do, Sojiro?”

“She’s telling the truth,” Boss said.

“For God’s sake, don’t side with her,” Wakaba said, sitting back to cross her arms. Futaba was standing not even two feet away from her, with soap bubbles dripping off her glasses and her jaw clenched against tears. Yuuki hadn’t moved a muscle, his container of vegetables in a white-knuckled grip. He was probably thumbing at his rings.

Ann kicked Ryuji under the table. She gave a questioning look to the whole scene, and Ryuji regretted bringing her here. This wasn’t how he wanted her return to Japan to be.

 _Later_ , he mouthed, because it was too complicated to explain.

“If aliens had sent us data, I’d think our astronomers would have picked it up,” Wakaba was saying, a nail tapping on her forearm. “No one would have heard about it until we’d gotten something conclusive out of it, too. So the fact that Futaba, of all people, is the only one to have seen this data—”

“But dozens have seen it,” Yusuke cut in. “And then they threw it away like trash. What were the final numbers again, Futaba?”

“Twenty-two thousand, five hundred and eighteen,” Futaba said, flat and toneless.

Yuuki gasped a little at the number. They’d never told him just how many people had gotten that first app because they worried how he would react; now that he knew, he curled in on himself, protecting his last tie to Akira: the phone in his pocket and the rings around his neck.

“That doesn’t mean a thing!” Wakaba protested.

“Sure it does,” Ryuji said. “It means thousands of people saw one of those missing kids and didn’t lift a damn finger to help him. Before you call ‘taba a liar maybe you should do your own research, lady, or we wouldn’t be sitting here trying to get it through that so-called smart brain of yours.”

Wakaba jerked so hard in his direction Ryuji was worried her neck would snap. She looked at him as if no one had ever had the gall to call her stupid before—probably no one ever had, but being a genius didn’t mean she was good at everything.

Boss gave him the stink eye for a good few seconds before sighing. He stood up, cracked his back, and said, “Let’s you and me head home, Wakaba. We don’t want to ruin your homecoming with an argument, after all.”

“This is _not_ settled, Sojiro,” Wakaba said.

“I know,” Boss said. “But I’m tired, it’s late, and I’m pretty sure some of us here have school in the morning. We don’t need to sit here all night arguing over whether what Futaba had was junk data or not, or whether it came from aliens or not.”

He gave her a look that promised a stern lecture when they got back. Ryuji hoped it was something along the lines of _believe your goddamn daughter for once_. Ryuji hoped it made her think.

She took a deep breath, as if to argue back, but sighed. Stared around the room at them all—Ann shrugging when her turn came up—but got up, too. “Thank you for the party, Futaba. It was… nice.”

And then she marched out of the cafe, the little bell on the door jingling. Boss asked them to finish cleaning up, promised he’d try to change her mind a bit, and wished them all a good night. He left to a morose chorus of good nights, fingers working at his goatee.

When the last echo of the bell over the door faded, Futaba sobbed. She turned and buried her face in Yuuki’s shirt, her wet hands clinging to his back. Yuuki barely stumbled.

“Was—was it really twenty-two _thousand_?” he asked, and Futaba nodded.

“Twenty-two thousand… what?” Ann asked.

Everyone jerked like they just remembered she was there. Ryuji worked a hand through his hair, not sure how to explain the magic phone app Yuuki had gotten. He wasn’t sure how to explain anything, really.

“You said something about one of the missing kids,” she said. “Was one of them really there?”

A few beats of silence. No one could look at her. Yusuke brushed grease off his lips with one hand, stalling.

“Do you remember when we were finger painting at the rehab center two years ago, Takamaki?” Yuuki asked. “The news came on, and Yusuke got all disgusted with the scandal. I left in a hurry right after.”

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “That was the Amamiya kid, wasn’t it? And some woman came on and said her son was kidnapped, too.”

Ryuji remembered that night: Yuuki looking like he was about to puke, his hands still covered in finger paint, running out the door; a smeared, amateurish portrait of the missing boy left at his seat.

“I didn’t know it was Amamiya back then,” Yuuki said. “He didn’t know he was Amamiya back then. I don’t know if he does, now. It doesn’t work anymore.”

“He got a phone app that let him talk to Amamiya,” Ryuji said, before Ann could ask anymore. It was definitely odd to talk about Akira like he was still the missing kid from the news, but Amamiya’s name was the only one Ann would recognize. “The guy had amnesia. Yuuki was helping him through it. We don’t know how much he managed to remember.”

“So—so you found him? You found him and you didn’t say anything?” Ann asked.

“A phone app is not evidence,” Yusuke said.

“The coordinates don’t correspond to anyplace on Earth, either,” Futaba said, voice muffled. “I tried hacking the app but it didn’t do anything. I could barely understand what half the first code string was about. _Me_.”

“I told you, it’s complicated,” Ryuji reminded her.

“But—but you could talk to him,” she persisted, leaning back and clutching at a lock of hair. “He didn’t tell you anything? About where he was, or if he remembered being kidnapped, or—”

“He had _amnesia_ ,” Yuuki said. “And—and twenty-two thousand people ditched him. Twenty-two _thousand_ people left him there to rot. He wouldn’t have loaded down our conversations with Earth politics and theories on whether we could try his kidnappers in a court of law, okay? He wanted help, not a lawyer.”

“I’m pretty sure a lawyer got the app, too,” Futaba said.

“Oh, perfect,” Yuuki muttered.

Ann twisted her hair around her fingers. She pursed her lips, trying not to blurt out any other questions. “Okay,” she finally said.

“Okay?” Ryuji asked.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “You said you’ll explain later. I’ll listen. I don’t think you’re lying, it’s just kind of hard to believe.”

“It gets much worse,” Yusuke told her, as if that would help.

Ann smiled, shaky and unsure. For once since he sat down in the cafe, Ryuji wanted to pull her close and run his hands through her hair, explaining nothing except that everything would be alright. His heart wasn’t a jackhammer working in his chest this time, at least. He could look at her without feeling like the rest of the world could implode at that very second and it would be okay if she was nearby. “Great,” she said. “I’ll—I’ll prepare myself for even worse! But I should probably get going soon. To digest all of this.”

She got up. Ryuji did, too, prepared to walk her to the station, but she smiled that shaky and unsure smile again and this time Ryuji’s stomach plummeted. “I can make it back on my own,” she insisted, and with a goodbye and a promise to be in touch, left.

Ryuji stood there, gaping at the spot where her hair had disappeared beyond the door. It felt like something precious had slipped straight through his fingers, like he’d let the best thing he would ever see in his life walk away.

Yusuke came and stood by him as Yuuki and Futaba sunk to the floor. “We didn’t believe it at first, either.”

“Yeah,” Ryuji said, “but we don’t have proof this time. There’s no app. No way to talk to Akira. No way to get her or ‘taba’s mom to believe us. It’s great that Boss is on our side, but all we’ve got is our say-so, and that’s not much.”

“Even still, we have to try.”

“I know that! It’s just—without Akira around, how are we going to prove it’s true? ‘taba’s mom’s an adult. She probably thinks we’re making all this shit up.”

“If we can’t convince her otherwise, then we should let her,” Yusuke said. “There’s no use in trying to change another’s mind once it’s made up. There’s no use in insisting we’re right, either. All we can do is hope.”

“Hope’s not much.”

“Yes,” Yusuke agreed, in a voice that told Ryuji he knew exactly what hoping couldn’t accomplish. Hoping hadn’t gotten him out of Madarame’s any sooner. Hoping hadn’t helped him recover. “I know.”


	6. June, Part Three

Yusuke was more than happy to walk with Ryuji back to the station after the cafe was cleaned up. They’d left Yuuki and Futaba behind to sit in the dark of the attic with their thoughts to themselves—Ryuji hadn’t wanted to, but Futaba hadn’t wanted them to stay, and Yuuki was the one to mention how badly her mom might take the news of Futaba having a sleepover with a bunch of boys around. Forget getting her to listen to them then, he’d said, when she was clearly in Territorial Mom Mode.

Ryuji kicked at some trash left on the ground, then hurried to pick it up. People had no damn respect. Futaba’s mom had no damn respect.

He must have made a noise, because Yusuke asked, “Are you alright?”

“Course not,” Ryuji said. “All that shit with ‘taba’s mom, ‘n then Ann—I dunno what to do about it. About any of it.”

“It was good to see her. Ann, I mean.”

“Yeah, it was, huh?”

There would be cans for his piece of trash at the station, but until they got there Ryuji had to hold on to it. He pressed against the sides of it—dented metal, probably a soda or beer can—and it rang out, hollow and sharp in the alleys.

And at least now that Ann was gone he felt more like himself again. He wasn’t in danger of getting lost in her eyes or in the fall of her hair or in the curve of her smile or any of that sappy chick-flick shit.

“She’s even lovelier now than she was two years ago,” Yusuke said. “Do you think she would model for me if I asked?”

“She’s still technically a model, Yusuke. You’d have to ask her if she wants to pose for you, too.”

“And you won’t be jealous if I do?”

His can crumpled easily in his fist. Some liquid dripped out of it, cold and sticky across his fingers. He sniffed at it. Beer, acrid and foul. “Why would I be jealous?”

“I could be wrong, but,” Yusuke said, “you have feelings for her, don’t you? You looked at her differently in the cafe than you did two years ago. If I dared to say so, I’d say—”

Ryuji groaned a warning in his throat. It went unheeded. Yusuke actually sounded pretty smug for a guy who was almost as bad at reading a room as Futaba. “—that you were rather besotted,” he finished.

“Who the hell says ‘besotted’ anymore?”

“I do,” Yusuke said. “Am I wrong, though? If I am, you should tell me.”

Ryuji grit his teeth. “Guess not,” he forced out. “I just—I picked her up from the airport and found out she’s way hotter in person in she is in her photos. Like, way hotter. Even you noticed.”

“And?”

“And we chased her off with talks about aliens and alien tech and missing kids,” Ryuji reminded him. “She practically ran out that door, Yusuke! She’s not gonna wanna come back and talk, and I’m never gonna see her again, so no matter what I feel, it’s dead. It’s gotta be.”

Yusuke hummed. “Akira and the app aside, that’s not the only reason you’re so perturbed.”

Perturbed. Sometimes Ryuji wondered what era Yusuke had wandered into being from. “It kind of is, though. If talk about Akira and the app scare her off, she’s not going to want to spend time with us anymore. She’s going to hang out with her model buddies and shmooze with her bosses and visit Suzui over the summer. She’s gonna put Kamoshida and the rehab center and _us_ behind her. And since when did you start analyzing people, anyway?”

“I see a therapist twice monthly,” Yusuke said. “I suppose some of his questions have rubbed off on me, the way Ann has rubbed off on you.”

“I’m not some kinda peacekeeper.” That was Ann’s job: bring everybody together so they didn’t have to heal alone. Keep everyone together so they didn’t have to go through life alone. Learn when to mediate and stop the fights from ever starting.

When it came to fights, though, Ryuji would always swing first. He knew that. He wasn’t stupid.

Yusuke stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, turned him around so they had to look each other in the eye, even if Ryuji had to crane his neck to do it. Damn Yusuke and his height. “When we thought Yuuki had something to do with Amamiya’s disappearance, you were the only one who voiced your doubt. You said he couldn’t be like that, you said there was no way, and then you went and you got answers. Who do you think was the one who found Suzui’s suicide note? Her parents, stuck at their daughter’s side at the hospital?”

Ann found that note? “When’d you find that out?”

“Suzui told me. Ann went and found the truth and blared it for the world to hear, and that’s why Kamoshida sits behind bars today. You went and found the truth as well, even if it’s too ludicrous for the world at large to understand. It hurt her to find that truth, and it hurt you, too.”

Yuuki and the way he’d lain on the floor, defeated. The memory of pressure still on Ryuji’s hands, on his thighs—even on his hips, where Yuuki had ground into him. That had been the weirdest part, Ryuji thought. It had come out of fucking nowhere, and sometimes in the middle of the night Ryuji wondered where he really meant to aim that, because it clearly hadn’t done what Yuuki had wanted it to.

Finding the truth of Yuuki’s weird phone app wasn’t just hard—Ryuji thought he had lost a friend for good, doing that. But… “You were the one who dragged me back to make up for it,” he said, trying to push Yusuke’s hand off his shoulder. Some drunk businessman was staring, his cheeks flushed, head tilted. “So aren’t you the one who took after Ann?”

Yusuke was quiet for a moment. “Perhaps we all took after her,” he said after a while. “Perhaps it was a bad analogy. I only meant—that is, I meant to say that if she clearly means so much to you, we should do our best to make sure she learns the truth. That way you won’t have to be apart.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway.” With a shrug, Yusuke’s hand dropped. He stared at it like he didn’t know what to do with it now. “She’s—she’s gorgeous, Yusuke. She’s a model. She’s not gonna want to ruin her rep by being with someone like me. I’m still Shujin’s delinquent, okay?”

“You aren’t,” Yusuke argued. “You’re more than that. And if you gave her the chance to reject you personally, instead of making up excuses, perhaps you would find out for yourself, whether you’re good enough for her.” Yusuke leaned in close; there was a fine line of dried paint by one of his eyebrows that caught Ryuji’s eye with its flatness against his skin. “And if you don’t, I will.”

“Wait—what?”

He leaned back and kept walking. “She’s certainly very pretty. Very pleasing to the eye. Perhaps, if I can get her to model for me, after all’s said and done I’ll ask her on a proper date. Without my sketchbook and art supplies at hand, so I can take her in in all of her natural beauty, with every kind of backdrop Tokyo can supply.”

“Wait a sec!” Ryuji chased after him, him and his long-ass legs bounding out of reach without much effort. Three inches never felt like much of a difference until now. “I—you can’t be serious, dude! It’s, like, the first rule of bro code: don’t go after the girl your bro has an eye on!”

“Then get there before I do,” Yusuke said simply.

“I just said I can’t!”

“You can, you just don’t _believe_ you can. You don’t think she’ll say yes, even just to test the waters a bit? You don’t dare to hope that she will, that she’ll always think of you as some kind of delinquent? If she truly knows you, she’ll know you are more than just one bad decision and a mouthful of slander.”

As if. As if Ryuji was ever going to be anything more than that one bad decision—look at his no-good dad, living with one bad decision by making more of them. As if Ryuji wasn’t going to have to live with what he’d done for the rest of his life: ruining the rest of the track team’s chances at success, not just his own; burdening his ma and his friends with his terrible decisions, not just himself, and making them all carry the weight of his future with him. He couldn’t be anything on his own anymore. He couldn’t be anyone on his own anymore.

It wasn’t true. It was true. Sometimes he believed it, and sometimes he didn’t, but now was one of the times he did.

“Listen to me,” Yusuke said, spinning around to grasp at his shoulders. “If I were Kamoshida, you wouldn’t let me do it, would you?”

“No,” Ryuji said.

“And if I were some nameless bad-boy from America, you wouldn’t let me do it then, either?”

As if a delinquent from America would actually follow Ann to Japan. Who the hell thought that trope was still relevant, anyway? “No.”

“If I were Yuuki, you wouldn’t let me do it?”

“Yuuki’s gay,” Ryuji said, softly enough that no one walking by them could hear. Half of them were sloshed beyond comprehension of normal conversations—whispered ones were probably out of the question.

“But if he weren’t?”

If Yuuki was straight he’d probably go for girls like Suzui, but Ryuji could see how he might fall for Ann: bright and bubbly Ann, who smiled like the sun shone, boundless and unafraid now that Kamoshida was a thing of the past. Ann would have dragged him out of his apartment for that summer festival. Ann would have hung off his arm all night long if she wanted to, and there wouldn’t have been a thing Yuuki could have done about it.

Ann would have made him happy, if Yuuki was straight. People would still whisper about why Ann settled for such an average guy; people would whisper about why she wouldn’t date someone who was just as gorgeous as she was. They’d find their way into Yuuki’s head like worms in an apple, turning him into mush and rot from the inside out.

Could Ann save him from that? Could Ann save Ryuji from that, from the fallout of whatever he would wind up yelling at them to get them to stop? Ryuji’s ma was still dealing with Shujin backlash, and it had been three damn years since Kamoshida broke his leg. His ma was still dealing with the aftermath of his dad, leaving without having even a shred of paperwork to fill out. The damn legal fees and Ryuji’s tuition had practically swallowed her alive.

… But this wasn’t about his ma, or Yuuki. This was about Ann. Ann would go on a raving warpath if she felt slighted and was angry enough. Ann would defend whoever she chose to date with every fiber of her body. She’d tell everybody it was none of their business. She’d get the police involved if she had to.

There was no way Ann would want that again, but.

But.

“Eff you, you weirdo,” Ryuji said. It came out too weak, too breathless. His eyes burned with tears. “Don’t say that kinda shit. ‘Sides, she just came back tonight. She’s gonna be stressing about… everything, for a while. Don’t make me make it worse.”

“Alright,” Yusuke said, caving way too easy. “I only want you to think on it. To give yourself a chance. Everyone deserves to be happy—or so my therapist tells me.”

“Damn, you’re so weird,” Ryuji told him. He screwed his eyes shut against the building heat and hoped whatever managed to squeeze through was hidden by the night. Fuck, he hated crying. Hated how it dredged up memories of his dad, screaming at him not to cry because crying was for the weak. Screaming at him to take the hit because if Ryuji wanted to play at being a hero he had to take a beating like one. Screaming at him that it was all in self-defense because Ryuji swung first.

What an awful, nasty child he was. How disobedient. How unruly. How misbehaved. Didn’t his mother teach him manners? Didn’t his mother know how to discipline her children? Didn’t this mean she was an awful mother?

And his ma had taken every harsh word with a blank smile on her face. Yes, she was trying; yes, she was teaching him manners; yes, she made sure to discipline him. But she also cried into her pillow at night, in the early hours of the morning when Ryuji should have been fast asleep. She was proud when he did well and disappointed when he didn’t.

His ma would want him to be happy, too.

His ma wasn’t around, though. With any luck she was home from the bank, sitting in front of the TV folding laundry while watching some mindless drama. Maybe having a long phone call with one of her own friends, finding a little piece of happiness in the simplicity of living.

“Ryuji?” Yusuke asked, because he’d gone too long without saying anything.

Ryuji didn’t want to wait to get home for this. Ryuji didn’t want his ma asking him questions—not just yet, anyway—and badgering him until he spilled the beans. She knew how to get him to talk by now, and he didn’t want to talk to her about this: about Ann, and whether or not it was love or the start of it, and whether or not he should go for it.

He didn’t want to wait, so he dragged Yusuke into a crushing bear hug, face planted into Yusuke’s bony shoulder. If people weren’t eyeing them before, they were now.

“Um,” Yusuke said, suddenly unsure what to do with his hands.

“Gimme until summer break is over,” Ryuji said. “Lemme think it out. How to tell her, ‘n whether or not it’s really how I feel ‘n shit. She’s already had one bad boyfriend. I don’t wanna give her another.”

“But summer break is two months from now,” Yusuke protested.

“Yeah, well,” Ryuji said, “don’t wanna dump too much on her. She might reject me just ‘cause it’ll be too much to process. It’s for her as much as it’s for me, okay?”

Besides, then he wouldn’t be asking her out in a dingy cafe—sorry, Boss—or in some puke-soaked street, or in a crowded mall. If he told her loved her—if he loved her at all, and he felt like he did, but maybe he was wrong—he wanted it to be between the two of them, without half of Tokyo listening in from the sidelines.

He saw those videos online. They were awful when they went wrong.

“I suppose that’s fair,” Yusuke said. “Now, if you would let go—I’m finding it hard to breathe—”

Ryuji snorted. “Shoulda thought of that before ya started this up, Yusuke. I’m not letting go for a while.”

Yusuke sputtered out half-formed protests, then gave up with a sigh when he noticed none of them worked to relax Ryuji’s grip. “Very well. If I must.”

“Yeah, you must. Now shut up.”

* * *

When Ryuji finally let him go, Yusuke’s ribs felt bruised. He was sure he was going to feel the force of that hug for weeks, if not months, and he tried in vain to rub the blood back into each aching inch of skin on their way to the train station.

Ryuji snickered at him and elbowed him hard in the soft flesh above his hips, then snickered some more at his frown. There were red rings around his eyes, and the skin around his cheekbones was rubbed raw, but he didn’t say a word other than his usual farewell at the Shibuya station.

Yusuke watched him go, thinking how nice it would be to put any weight behind his threat. To date Ann, when Yusuke’s heart belonged so fully to another it was a wonder Ryuji hadn’t caught the hitch in his voice every time Yusuke said his name, the slight pause as Yusuke wondered at the feeling of it rolling off his tongue. It was the same way Ryuji had looked at Ann in the cafe: as if his eyes refused to believe that anything so beautiful could exist that they had to behold her for as long as humanly possible. He’d only looked away to defend Futaba and Yuuki.

Yusuke, for his part, hadn’t managed quite the same. When his eyes were drawn to the curve of Yuuki’s neck for the sixth time in ten minutes he’d sequestered himself by turning his back and trying to concentrate on his food, which meant he ate far too much too quickly, to the point that Boss had dragged him aside as the party wound down to talk about painting so that Yusuke couldn’t eat any more.

Yusuke could likely do the job he wanted, too—once he wasn’t shaking like a leaf in a gale whenever he picked up a brush. His paintings at home languished beneath his inability, except for the ugly one, the one that mimicked his own heart. That one calmed him down enough for the finer strokes the others demanded, even if he’d had to scrap an entire canvas after his jaunt to the church.

The church. He checked his phone; Togo would be stopping for the evening this late. She hated staying out too long, while he looked for any excuse not to go back to his apartment and Nakanohara and the canvases and Akira.

… Actually, Nakanohara wouldn’t be home, would he? This was the usual time he was out. So if he went back now, it would just be Yusuke and the canvases, the smell of paint and paint thinner surrounding him, and Akira.

He didn’t think he could focus on Akira tonight, or the paintings. Going straight to bed was always an option, but if he did he would likely toss and turn, body unused to the early turn-in, thoughts turning to Yuuki and the way he looked at the party, the way he looked defending Futaba…

He huffed. No point standing around; he would wear himself out walking around for a bit, until the next train or the one after that, and then go home.

So he walked. He gave money to a young man busking for coins with his guitar outside the station and was rewarded with a grin that bunched up the young man’s eyes; he listened, for a while, to both of the gentlemen giving speeches by the underground mall entrance, one competing with the other with a megaphone and a sign in hand. He headed down Central Street, smelling the last wafts of cooking crepes mingling with the salt of Big Bang Burger’s fries; listened as people talked and joked and complained _there he is again, Maya, do something, would you?_

“Like what?” Maya hissed, and looking over her companion’s shoulders. “Yell? Scream? People will stare, Kayo!”

“Maybe I want them to,” Kayo said. “Maybe I want them to know how awful he is, following me around. I’m sick of it, Maya! Every damn day he’s here! I thought I’d have a nice night out for once, but there he is, ruining it!”

It was none of his business. Yusuke knew that most people wouldn’t take kindly to his interfering.

Unfortunately for those people, he didn’t care. He leaned down as nonchalantly as he could and asked her, “Do you need help?”

Kayo was a middle-aged woman, likely in her thirties, and the most exposure she likely ever had to someone as tall as Yusuke had to be the models in foreign fashion magazines. She stared up at him in shock and Yusuke noted her business suit and the purse dangling from her arm; Maya was nearly the same, except her hair was a lighter shade of brown than her friend’s and her lips shone with gloss. They both had the beginnings of worry lines around their mouths.

“Yes,” Kayo said, too quickly. She tugged him closer. “Yes, please. He’s—he’s my ex. We broke up three years ago, but because we live so close to each other, he always follows me home from work. I can’t stand it. I want him to stop.”

Her voice shook, her lips quivered. Yusuke glanced over their shoulders as her eyes welled with tears and spotted no one being too suspicious, save for Nakanohara staring at him in shock. “What does he look like?”

Maya pulled out her phone and browsed her pictures with a shaking hand. She kept glancing behind them every few seconds, worried Kayo’s ex was drawing closer. “He hasn’t done anything bad,” she said, “but following Kayo home everyday for three years? That’s just odd. It’s not right, is it, to follow someone home all the time like that?”

Then she thrust her phone in Yusuke’s face, and his stomach dropped. Another glance behind him showed that Nakanohara had turned around and was busy pushing through the crowds, his head ducked low to make him near-invisible in the dark.

“I see,” Yusuke said. He tried to breathe.

But it was hard, with the picture in front of him, Kayo clinging to his sleeve, and Nakanohara fleeing at his back.

“I will take care of it,” he told the women. “And—well, if he ever does so again—”

“I’ll scream,” Kayo said, determined. “If I ever see him again, I’ll scream.”

“Kayo,” Maya said, at a loss. Yusuke didn’t blame her.

There was only one person he could blame, and the man was currently trying to run. Yusuke wouldn’t let him, and unless Nakanohara wanted to live in a net cafe for the rest of his life, he would have to return to the apartment sooner or later.

“Right,” he said, sounding sure even as his knees began to shake.

Not Nakanohara too. Why in the world couldn’t Yusuke find one—just _one_ —person in this entire city who wanted to treat him like family and wasn’t corrupt to their core?

 _Let it be a mistake_ , he pleaded to himself as he chased after his guardian. He shoved through men and women alike, jostling bags and jolting strollers and nearly tripping over a three-year-old left to wander the crowd. _Let it be a mistake._

But Maya’s picture had been of Kayo and Nakanohara, five years younger and looking happier than Yusuke had ever seen him. Five years ago Nakanohara had been in love, and now he was stalking his ex-girlfriend and making her fit to scream in public. Something had gone wrong there, and Yusuke—

Well, he wanted to know why, but knew that Nakanohara wouldn’t tell him if he didn’t want to even if Yusuke begged him. And he couldn’t make Nakanohara see sense, either. The most he could do was find out why—if he said, if he wanted to say—and try to help him through it.

But first, Yusuke had to catch him.

It wound up easier than Yusuke expected: if he plowed ahead through the crowd, plenty of people noticed and moved aside, which made catching up to him so simple that Yusuke was tempted to laugh—but he wasn’t sure why, wasn’t sure whether it was because of the naked fear in some of the faces he passed by, or whether it was because Nakanohara thought he could run and hide from Yusuke, of all people—but he swallowed it down and laid a heavy hand on Nakanohara’s shoulder. His guardian froze where he stood, one foot poised midstep, and shrunk even further.

“You’ve an explanation, I suppose,” Yusuke said.

“Not here, Yusuke,” Nakanohara said. “Please. Not here.”

“Why not?”

He knew why: because people were staring, and listening, and some had their phones out ready to record at the press of a button. Kayo, for all that she had said that she hated him now, likely wouldn’t want Nakanohara’s reputation to be tarnished even further. She hadn’t done anything so far; she had asked Yusuke to do something about it so she wouldn’t have to. A little bit of leftover love fueling her desire not to ruin their chances to still be amicable when they passed each other on the street.

Nakanohara was ruining that, one day at a time. He was also remaining silent, and several schoolgirls in a group were looking over and giggling.

Yusuke sighed, straightened, let his white-knuckled grip relax. Nakanohara looked over his shoulder, almost in surprise. “Lead the way, then,” Yusuke said, knowing that whatever he said now would mean nothing to the imaginations of teenagers. He’d found several books with this exact plotline while cleaning Leblanc’s attic—judging from the dust on them, Futaba had brought them over at some point or another and then forgotten them—and one of the schoolgirls was holding a book by the same author. She hid her giggles and smiles within its pages as they gossiped and Yusuke felt sorry for the work.

It deserved more than to be used as a source of cheap thrills.

When Nakanohara finally continued on his way to the station, Yusuke followed only a beat behind, leaving the gossipmongers of Shibuya to their musings. They rode home in silence; they walked up the street and to the door in silence; they removed shoes and their light jackets in silence.

Nakanohara beckoned him down the hall, past his room and the bath, to another: Nakanohara’s bedroom, his bed neatly made, a suit already waiting for tomorrow on a hanger on the wall. An empty desk sat in a corner—empty until Nakanohara opened the drawers and pulled out sketchbook after sketchbook, pens and pencils in varying sizes and colors, erasers and sharpeners, until the desk seemed fit to collapse under the weight of it all.

“I told you what love does, Yusuke,” he said, thumbing through a sketchbook picked at random off the pile. “I told you it makes fools of man. I told you it drives us to selfishness. Kayo can’t remember what it’s like to love me, and everyday I go out with the hope that today will be the day she remembers. But she doesn’t.”

Yusuke frowned. “You’ve been following her home from work because you want her to love you again.”

“She knows how much she means to me.” He stopped at a sketch of Kayo in front of a stretch of trees, her sundress billowing in the wind, one hand keeping her hat in place. A small smile lit his face.

It was like looking at a different person.

“I bought this apartment for her—for us,” Nakanohara said. “But, when I had everything of mine moved in and asked her to live with me, she told she wanted to end it. End it! As if she didn’t realize that she had rekindled that fire in my soul, Yusuke—the fire, the passion, to create! To bring works of art to life!”

Asking her after the apartment was bought seemed dreadfully out of order—but not to Nakanohara, flinging his sketchbook to the ground to flip doggedly through another’s pages. “You know what it’s like, Yusuke, to lose that! To regain it—to be so utterly happy that I felt another day would stop my heart out of sheer joy—and then to lose it again—and worse, lose everything I held dear: Kayo and her love, and the will to paint… It was torturous, Yusuke. I couldn’t stand it.”

“So you follow her home from work,” Yusuke said. “You scare her. You frighten her—because you want her to love you back?”

“Yes, exactly,” Nakanohara said, nodding with such emphasis his glasses threatened to fly off. “One day she will, and we’ll be able to live happily together at last.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

He laughed. “Of course I do! It’s foolish to—I’ve seen her on dates with other men by now, I’ve watched her kiss them all, I’ve watched them stagger into love hotels and not leave until the early hours of the mornings—and it’s selfish of me to, but if I don’t love her, Yusuke, I won’t have anything left.”

“But you do have something,” Yusuke said. “You have these sketches. You put time and effort into Kayo’s figure—she’s much better than you older work—but your landscapes are the same as always. They detract from her beauty simply by existing on the page. Are you sure—”

“I said I’m sure!” With a swipe of a hand, supplies scattered across the floor. “Why can’t you understand? Kayo is the reason I picked up a pen to draw again! I _need_ her back! For all of your obsession over that boy, I thought you would understand, Yusuke!”

“I draw him, yes,” Yusuke said, trying to keep his voice even. Nakanohara had snooped through his things, Nakanohara had been in his room looking through his sketchbooks like Madarame had looked through his sketchbooks, marking off which ones would make good paintings or not. “But I don’t follow him around to every corner of Tokyo hoping that if he sees me enough he’ll fall in love with me. I don’t base half my day around what he’s doing. I let him live and grow on his own.”

“You’re foolish to,” Nakanohara said. “Isn’t that how you lost him in the first place, Yusuke? You let him _live_ , and he found someone he loved more.”

“He was in love before we met,” Yusuke admitted. “He didn’t know it, and I didn’t know it, but what we felt—in our separate ways—was love. But, this, Nakanohara—stalking him wouldn’t be love. Making him want to leave me even further wouldn’t be love. You’re going to sink in a mire of heartbreak at this rate—”

Nakanohara’s hands gripped his shirt so quickly Yusuke didn’t have time to flinch. His guardian pulled him in close, until Yusuke could see the tea stains on his teeth, could smell the miso soup he had for dinner on his breath. His eyes were wild with rage, and Yusuke found he couldn’t breathe at the sight of them. “If Madarame taught me anything, it’s to keep that which makes us worthwhile close at hand. Kayo makes me worthwhile. Kayo makes me want to draw again. She makes me want to paint again. As long as she’s nearby, I can’t be worthless. I won’t be worthless!”

“You aren’t worthless.”

“Don’t lie! If I wasn’t worthless, she would be the one living here with me, not _you_!”

Yusuke didn’t know what to say to that. He was second pick because Nakanohara had been spurned by the love of his life; he was worth less than the love that would have kept Nakanohara churning out paintings at a rate faster than Madarame could sell them.

“You aren’t worthless,” he repeated instead, louder against Nakanohara’s animalistic growl. “You aren’t, because if you were Kayo would have gone screaming to the police the second she saw you following her. She would have had you arrested. She would have made up something to make sure you could never follow her again—but she didn’t. Isn’t that proof enough that you’re worth something to her, even if that worth isn’t the same as it used to be?”

Nakanohara glared at him even harder for that, but seemed to be at a loss as to what to say; Yusuke took the chance to grip at him in the same way he was and nearly slammed their foreheads together. “We are more than what Madarame made us into,” he said, so close now he could feel the way Nakanohara trembled. “We are more than what our love makes us into as well. You are more than a tool through which Kayo’s beauty is passed on to the world; anyone can do that, Nakanohara. Any man with a camera and enough love for her can do that. But you—you created masterpieces even through the simplest of objects and the plainest of scenery, and I wish you could find that beauty for yourself again.”

“Kayo is all I have,” Nakanohara insisted. “She is everything to me.”

Yusuke tried to search his gaze for a wavering of that insistence but couldn’t—Nakanohara’s glasses were in the way and fogged up between them, and Yusuke wished he could fling them to the side to see what, exactly, Nakanohara was so afraid of. The eyes were windows to the soul, wise old men had written, but Yusuke couldn’t see. All he could do was hear the desperation in Nakanohara’s voice and feel the trembling of his knees. He was frightened, terrified—of what, though? Of Yusuke tearing out some hidden, horrible truth and forcing him to see it?

Yusuke wasn’t even sure he could handle it. Whatever was bothering his guardian at his core could very easily infect Yusuke, too, because they both knew of love that couldn’t be. They were both trying to convince themselves they could live without that love and failing.

And Nakanohara—if he didn’t cease with his stalking, the results weren’t going to be good for him. Or for Yusuke, for that matter.

“Then let us make a deal, Nakanohara,” Yusuke said. “In my room I am working on three paintings. Two of them aren’t going very well, but one is. One I will keep for myself, and the other two I will give away. Who do you think I want to give them to?”

“That boy,” Nakanohara said, a crease furrowing his brow. “The one you love.”

“Yes, him. And I know he’ll be quite happy indeed to receive them, because one will be infused with my love for him, and one will be infused with _his_ love’s love for him.” As much as it hurt Yusuke to say so, Yuuki would likely enjoy that one much better. Yusuke was striving to make his technique as realistic as possible, which was difficult enough when just holding a brush caused his hands to shake. “He’ll be happy, and I will either be happy myself, or absolutely miserable. But that is not the point; by the time I finish these three paintings, you too will have created something. A gift for Kayo.”

“For Kayo,” Nakanohara muttered, eyes drawn to his sketchbooks.

“It can’t have Kayo in it,” Yusuke said, following his gaze. Nakanohara had gotten terribly good at sketching people—sketching Kayo—but his landscapes were still the most beautiful. Why couldn’t he see that?

Nakanohara clicked his tongue but held it, waiting.

“Let it have no identifying marks on it other than your brushstrokes alone. No men, no women, no children. No Kayo or her friends. Let it be something she will proudly hang on her wall out of sheer desire to show off something beautiful she has received. Let it be something she will love for what it is, and not who it came from. Put everything you have into it. All your love for her and for art—put it in that painting.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t think you can.” Yusuke hated every word. He hated antagonizing; Ryuji was one thing, but this was his guardian. Ryuji would forgive him, but Nakanohara might not, and then where would Yusuke be? “Because I don’t think you can finish one painting by the time I finish three. Because I don’t think you can create something untainted by this so-called love of yours. Because I don’t think you have any talent for art anymore if it doesn’t involve Kayo.”

“You said I did a few minutes ago,” Nakanohara argued.

“I take it back, then.”

Whatever the end result, it needed to be worth the twist in Nakanohara’s lips. Needed to be worth the sharp gasps of breath as he thought it over. Needed to be worth the squirming, burning sensation in Yusuke’s gut. A competition between them would be exactly like life under Madarame, except Madarame was no longer around to steal works off of canvases in the middle of the night or to beg with his eyes filled with tears that he needed just one more painting to sell to make ends meet for the month. Madarame wouldn’t be here to judge them with his discerning eye. Madarame wouldn’t be here at all.

Nakanohara licked his lips. “You said this was a deal, Yusuke. What are the stakes?”

“If you manage to finish the painting before I finish mine, I won’t badger you on your love anymore. I won’t try to stop you from seeing her. If I see you on the street following her, I’ll turn the other way, even if she begs me not to.”

“And if I don’t?”

Yes, what if he didn’t? Yusuke could nearly hear Madarame whisper it in his ear, with a chuckle alongside. What if he didn’t, because he had no love for a painting that didn’t include Kayo in it?

But that was obvious, wasn’t it?

“Then you’ll stop following her.” Yusuke ignored Nakanohara’s hiss and the involuntary shake the older man gave him. Ignored it the way he could keep ignoring everything else around him until the paintings were done and Akira was home. “You will stop following her. You’ll let her live her life as she chooses to, instead of being witness to every private moment she wouldn’t want to share. You’ll stop following her the same way—” he cut off. He didn’t know if it was true or not, but it had to be. Years after Nakanohara had left, and the man was still obsessing over Madarame.

“The same way as what, Yusuke?”

“The same way Madarame follows us both,” Yusuke finished. “He lives inside of us now, too, not just in his prison cell cursing our names. You will stop following her as he did and does, hounding our every step and guiding our eyes to the most noteworthy of scenes and people to paint. I would like it if you got help as I do, but leaving Kayo be will be enough for me.”

“You must be joking,” Nakanohara said, but he was thinking about it. His eyes wandered; they didn’t stay trained on Yusuke for long, as his grip on Yusuke’s shirt slowly relaxed until he let go. “You can’t—you can’t think that I can’t finish one painting when you’ve barely got three started, Yusuke.”

“But I do, or I wouldn’t bet that I could.”

“You’re insane,” he said. Then he laughed. “But so am I. Fine. So be it, Yusuke. You have your bet. Now leave, please. I’ve work to get started.”

“I’m sure you do,” Yusuke said, and shut the door on Nakanohara rummaging through the mess on the floor for a clean sketchbook and a pencil.

Then he leaned against the door and wondered what possessed him to make the deal. Three paintings, by the time landscape master Nakanohara finished one? He must be insane.

Had to be insane.

But this wasn’t for Yusuke—or for Kayo, for that matter. It was for Nakanohara. Nakanohara, who despite clearly not wanting to, took him in. Kept him fed and clothed and in school. Nakanohara had been the one to grip his hand over a paintbrush and say softly, “Like this, Yusuke. The trees—you’ve got to be gentle with them if you want them to turn out well,” and had praised him on a job well done when Madarame liked the work.

Yusuke wished that Nakanohara would be back by the end of this deal. The kind one, who loved to paint for the joy of it and not to immortalize one solitary woman among millions.

(There was nothing… wrong with that. But by the end of his life with Madarame, that was all the old man had wanted: beautiful scenery and beautiful women. Yusuke was, in all honesty, sick of it.)

He sighed. Tugged his phone out of his pocket and hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep in the middle of a battle, and that if he did, Akira would forgive him.

* * *

Shinya Oda walked into the airsoft shop with as confident a stride as an awkward middleschooler could manage. One glare from the gruff man behind the counter froze him in his tracks.

“This ain’t a place for kids,” the man growled. His boots were on the countertop. Shinya’s mom would smack him if he ever dared to do the same, and he wound up glaring right back.

“You’re getting the glass dirty,” he said. “Won’t your boss get pissed if he finds out?”

That earned him a slightly-lessened glare. The guy dropped his boots, leaning forward; his hair was going gray along the edges, and there were earmuffs resting on top of his hat, but Shinya focused instead on the tattoo on his neck. Some kind of lizard.

“I guess he would,” the guy said, “or maybe he wouldn’t. You tell me, kid: would I mind if I put my feet up on the counter of the shop I own?”

“It’s lazy,” Shinya said, parroting his mom. What else was he supposed to do? Cry that it wasn’t fair an adult got to, and he didn’t?

Well, adults got to do lots of things that he didn’t. Like buy guns.

“Well, I’m a lazy old man,” the guy said, and leaned back in his chair. Taking it easy because Shinya wasn’t a threat.

Shinya could be a threat if he wanted, but then his mom would get involved. She’d be pissed at him for getting into fights with guys three times his age and twice his size. She’d be pissed at him in general. She was always angry, lately.

She must be losing.

“Whatever,” Shinya said, and turned to the racks of guns, running his hands over the pictures on the boxes and wishing he could afford any of these before he turned twenty. Probably not, if he wanted to keep playing Gun About. Where would he even put it? What would his mom think if she found a gun—even if it was only a model—in his room, or in his schoolbag?

The guy at the counter settled back to reading, the thunk of his boots on the counter completely unfair. Shinya wandered the store, spent ten whole minutes staring in awe at the minigun hanging from the ceiling, and was fingering a camo jacket when he asked, “Do you even sell most of this stuff?”

“Yeah, but not to kids like you,” was the guy’s answer. “You wanna put a model together, start with a Gundom, kid.”

“I don’t like robots.” He didn’t get what was so great about giant fighting robots. Shinya had watched a clip of a fight and wondered how the parts could constantly be replaced; they were just wastes of money and resources, destroying everything in their paths to beat up giant monsters or other giant robots.

The guy snorted. “You ‘n me both.”

“Guns are cooler, anyway,” Shinya said. The box in his hands was some kind of complicated-looking attachment. It might have been a scope. “And they’re more versatile than some giant robot.”

“That so? You think they’re cooler ‘cause some hero in a movie used one?”

His mom didn’t like him watching movies, especially violent ones. She probably wouldn’t give him an allowance if she found out he was using it to play Gun About. He was too young for it, she said. He was too young for everything, even though his classmates all liked action movies and Gun About and Last Fantasy, too.

It was stupid.

“I don’t like movies,” he lied. It was hard to be sure if he liked them if the only ones at home were for kids and babies. “I like Gun About.”

“That a game or something?”

“It’s a game. You get to run around a map killing monsters or enemy soldiers, but the arcade doesn’t have a good selection of guns to choose from. I had to get good with what they had.”

“That so?” Was that him, or was that humor in the guy’s voice? Was he laughing at him? “Which one’s your favorite, then?”

Shinya rattled off the model without thinking. A pistol, easy to reload and less of a cheat than a semi-automatic that spewed bullets like laser beams. Apparently it was the same model the SDF used. Shinya didn’t care: it was a good gun that did what he wanted it to, and it gave him enough of a challenge in regular Gun About and his opponents a nice handicap in PVP matches.

“Huh,” the guy said, and his boots thunked off the counter. “That’s a good one. Think I’ve got it… yeah, right here. C’mere for a sec.”

“Why?” Shinya asked, but approached the counter. The guy was digging around a shelf in the back, his magazine open and abandoned. Shinya stared at the guns on the pages and the knives under the counter.

“Here,” the guy said, setting something heavy down on top of his magazine. A gun.

Shinya’s favorite.

“Pick it up, I don’t mind,” the guy prompted.

“I thought you didn’t like kids. Especially not kids in your shop.”

“I don’t like kids in my shop,” the guy said. “But kids who are gun enthusiasts—that’s different. Go on and hold it for a bit; it’ll feel different from a controller. Then we’ll see if ya really like guns or not.”

Shinya searched his face for some kind of trick—maybe if he picked the gun up the guy would say he wasn’t ready to hold one, model or not; maybe the guy was trying to see if he’d refuse because he was too young for it—but found none, just scruff and an expectancy Shinya had never seen from an adult in his life. He reached out for the gun, slowly, the way skittish animals in the movies his mom let him watch reached for food from an unknown hand.

So fucking what if he was more than a little unsure about some guy letting him hold a model gun. So fucking what if he looked like a kid. He knew what he looked like, and it wasn’t fair.

But finally he was holding it. It wasn’t warm or cold, the way he imagined a real gun would feel like, and it didn’t feel like it was made of metal, even if it was heavy enough to help him pretend. His fingers almost didn’t reach the trigger. He didn’t dare touch it, anyway.

The last thing he needed was some stranger to walk in on him pointing a very realistic model gun at a defenseless bystander, so Shinya turned it around in is hands, feeling the smooth sides and the seamless fit of all its parts.

“Like it?” asked the guy.

“Yeah,” Shinya said. He put it down but kept his hands on top of it, trying to will them to let go. They didn’t want to. “It’s… it’s a nice gun. Thanks for letting me hold it.”

“Huh,” said the guy, “so you do have manners. You’re welcome.”

The door jingled open. Some highschooler stood in the doorway, staring.

The guy sighed. “Thought I told ya not to come here, Kaoru.”

“You weren’t answering your phone,” said the kid. Kaoru. He looked sheepish, as if he’d tried to come into the shop before and gotten kicked out for his trouble. “I just wanted to know if you were coming home for dinner or not.”

“I’ll be there,” the guy said. “Now go home. The shop ain’t a playground.”

Kaoru stared at Shinya, the question plain on his face. Shinya stared back. The guy noticed, tugged the gun out from under Shinya’s hands, and added, “And take him, too. You’ll both scare off my regulars. Get going.”

“Alright,” Kaoru said, and Shinya would have believed the resignation in his voice if he hadn’t snatched one of Shinya’s wrists to tug him out of the building. His nails pinched. Shinya was sure his hand was going to go numb, and he tugged and tugged at it until Kaoru let go.

Kaoru huffed, crossing his arms and staring at the crowd of people going by on Central Street. Shinya thought he saw that tall guy from the park pass by, but his hair was too short and too dark to pass. He rubbed the blood back into his hand.

“Dad doesn’t usually let people touch his stock, you know,” Kaoru said.

“That guy’s your dad?”

Kaoru nodded. He still looked kind of pissed. “He adopted me, but he’s still my dad. Lately I’ve been wondering if he’s rethinking it, though. He’s never home until real late, he misses dinner all the time… I can’t remember the last time I got to see him outside of the shop.”

“Uh, okay,” Shinya muttered. He didn’t ask for a backstory, dammit. “So what?”

Kaoru looked at him. “So it’s really lonely eating dinner by yourself six nights a week. So it’s really annoying to think he cares about his shop more than he cares about me. So it’s frustrating to see that he’s letting some kid touch his stock when I can’t even set foot inside. That’s what.”

“He can’t really make you leave, can he?”

“How should I know? If I defy him and he disowns me, what’ll I do then?”

“How should I know?” Shinya echoed back. He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m just a kid, like you said.”

“Sorry,” Kaoru sighed. He looked over Shinya’s head to the shop, hidden in its alley behind the hustle and bustle of Central Street. “Let’s go get crepes,” he said after a while. “We can split one, and I can see if Dad’s coming out of his shop anytime soon.”

“Why would I want to do that?”

“Because Dad let you touch his stock and I want to know why, and I can’t know that if you run off and we never see each other again,” Kaoru said, tugging at his sleeve this time. He hauled them both to the crepe stand’s line.

Shinya let him do it, in a daze. Some weirdo highscooler wanted to talk to him, and it wasn’t to curse him out for his hair or his skills in Gun About. Some weirdo highschooler wanted to talk to him about _guns_. “Is it your treat or are you gonna tell me we have to split it?” he asked.

“I suggested it,” Kaoru said, “so it’s my treat.”

“I’m not gonna let you back out of that,” Shinya said, trying to read the menu. He was too damn short; they would have to get closer.

“I never intended to,” Kaoru said, “but this line is awfully long. Dad might finish up before we can order.”

“I’m still holding you to it,” Shinya told him.

Kaoru laughed. “Alright, alright.”

He pulled out his phone to wait out the crowd. Shinya nearly did the same, but a girl hanging off her boyfriend’s arm smacked into him. She giggled out an apology as they kept going, and Shinya seethed. In this crowd someone was sure to look over his shoulder, and when they did they were sure to call him out for playing a game with a pink-haired character, as if he had any real choice in the matter. They wouldn’t know or care that he hadn’t had much of a selection; they’d only pick on what they saw right in front of their faces.

But he didn’t want to stand in this long-ass line doing nothing. Pink Girl was steadily getting stronger; another hour or two of grinding would make her even stronger.

He started up the app. Fuck any asshole who decided to pick on a middleschooler, Shinya was bored, and Kaoru wasn’t much conversation as he texted away on his own phone—in fact he only came out of it halfway through a battle with a pair of robots, glancing at the screen long enough to watch Pink Girl flash her victory pose.

“What are you playing?” he asked as Pink Girl got zapped back to the map. All the maps looked the same. All the monsters did, too. Shinya couldn’t even tell him where they were.

“Beats me,” he said. “It was on my phone when I got it. It’s not Gun About, but it does the trick when I need to kill time.”

“Okay,” Kaoru said, watching him spin Pink Girl in circles. “So, what are you doing?”

“Training.”

Kaoru waited for more. There wasn’t. “That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s no goal, or a mission, or anything like that?”

“Probably, but doing those makes them talk to each other.” Shinya wasn’t sure what was more pathetic: the fact that he was playing a game he didn’t know the end goal of, or playing it without a purpose. Just training would only last him so long. He’d max out Pink Girl eventually. “Listening is annoying, so I just skip it, but sometimes it takes forever.”

“You… you just skip the plot,” Kaoru said.

“Yeah. I just said so.”

“How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know the plot?”

Shinya shrugged. “Sometimes I get there on accident. Sometimes it takes a while.”

“Even Gun About has a plot, you know.”

“Not the arcade version,” Shinya told him, finally looking up from his screen. “If it did no one would want to play it because no one goes to an arcade to watch a movie, okay? You get a briefing on the loading screen and then it sends you straight into battle.”

“That’s weird,” Kaoru said. “There’s—there’s got to be a plot. Let me look for second? Please?”

Shinya didn’t want him to, but if he made a scene people would stare. Kaoru was also treating him to half a crepe. Kaoru’s dad also owned an airsoft shop Shinya didn’t want to get banned from for not being nice enough Kaoru.

It would be a stupid thing to get banned for. He handed over his phone and shoved his hands in his pockets again; Kaoru thanked him—which was weird, after being so pushy about it—and started messing around with it until he finally dragged up a menu. He read something over while they waited in line. Shinya tugged at his hair, wishing it wasn’t taking so long.

“Huh,” Kaoru said at last, but then worked his way through another menu. That was the reason Shinya skipped all the plot: if he stopped to read everything, he never would have gotten as far as he did.

The line moved. Shinya felt ready to drop dead of boredom when Kaoru pressed his phone back into his hands. “Can you get out of the area?” he asked. “You’ve got to go to some church next. I want to see what happens.”

“It’s my game,” Shinya reminded him, spinning Pink Girl in a circle again. “Why should I?”

“Because you’ll fight stronger enemies,” Kaoru said. “Everybody knows that the farther you get in a game, the stronger the enemies get, too. You won’t have to grind for so long, then.”

Shinya rolled his eyes. The line moved. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

“It’s true!”

He huffed. Stared down at Pink Girl, now in battle with another batch of fairies, their dragonfly wings half a dozen different colors. He wouldn’t get a lot of EXP fighting them, and Pink Girl was already taking two hours to level up, now… Getting more at once and going faster would definitely be nice…

“Fine,” he groaned. “You can have your stupid plot. I’ll take you to the church.”

“Awesome,” Kaoru cheered, subdued in the crowd.

Shinya rolled his eyes again. What was so great about the story, anyway? It was just a bunch of scifi junk. They were in space. What kind of story could the game have with a setting like that?

On screen, Pink Girl defeated her enemies. With a wink and a twirl, she flourished her gauntlets, fuzzy tail wagging behind her.

Shinya left the map. The line moved forward. Kaoru watched over his shoulder, and it didn’t feel as weird as Shinya thought it would.

He dared to think it felt kind of nice.

* * *

The attic at Leblanc was, for once, completely dust-free. Ryuji had dared to climb on the rafters to get at the out-of-reach cobwebs, and had shaken dust down to the floor with every step he took.

If he thought of it as a balance beam—one some fifteen or twenty feet off the ground—it wasn’t so bad. Kinda. Maybe.

But the end result was all of the guys washing dust out of their hair at the bathhouse while Futaba went home to shower. Yuuki kept to himself in a corner until Ryuji and Yusuke were safe in the bath, and then he went in himself. Ryuji knew it was so he wouldn’t make them uncomfortable.

Ryuji thought that was bullshit. Ryuji also thought he might be right.

But, later, after they got back to Leblanc and the attic still smelled vaguely like lemons and not like musty blankets and dust, he allowed himself a little feeling of victory. Boss nodded at them all as they traipsed back upstairs; Yuuki stayed behind to tie on an apron and help out until Ann arrived.

As much as Ryuji wanted to ask about Futaba’s mom and whether they’d sat down and talked about all of this like they needed to, he didn’t. Futaba was being weirdly quiet again, which meant she didn’t want to talk. About the app or at all, Ryuji didn’t know.

It wasn’t his business. He just sent her a message asking if she was alright and left it at that, and when her phone pinged and she saw it she sent him a look, brow raised. _Seriously?_ that look said. _I’m right here._

He shrugged in response. Sent her another text saying she didn’t have to do this if she didn’t want to.

“I want to,” she said, though it came out gravelly and coarse. Yusuke looked up from his sketchbook just for a moment before returning to it, the colored pencil in his hand worn down to a stub.

“Cool,” Ryuji said.

So when Ann came up the stairs, bright and bubbly and full of more cheer than any one person could hold, he felt a bit of relief that Futaba didn’t dive underneath the desk in the corner seeking shadows and silence.

“Mishima said he’s going to bring up some drinks and then we can get started,” Ann said, as Futaba crept closer to the table. Yusuke’s bag of supplies seemed to have been upended on it, and Ryuji wondered what he even needed a protractor for. Or ten protractors, for that matter.

But that wasn’t Ryuji’s business.

Instead he passed Futaba a can of chips he’d picked up after their bath, and gave Ann the chocolate cupcakes he’d found with the rest of the snacks. How chocolate cupcakes could count as snacks he really didn’t want to know, but Ann beamed at him and tore into them, picking the frosting off of each one before breaking apart the cake.

Girls were weird. He was beginning to wonder if something was wrong with him, since the sight of Ann with chocolate crumbs between her teeth wasn’t repulsive at all.

“I’m surprised you wanted to do this so soon after…” Yusuke trailed off, mind still on his sketch, or a thousand miles away dreaming of what it might be like to date Ann.

Fuck.

“Well, I thought about not coming at all, honestly,” Ann said. “But I knew if I didn’t it would bug me for the rest of my life. The missing kids, and other universes—I mean, I know you said it’s not just some story you made up, but it is kind of out there, isn’t it? And that’s why you can’t tell anybody.”

“I didn’t think anyone would believe me, either,” Yuuki said, coming up the stairs with drinks in his arms and a pair of coffee cups in his hands. He gave Yusuke one and passed around the drinks, leaving the other coffee cup for himself. “So, when they did, it was… nice. More than nice. I don’t really know how to describe it, sorry.”

“I don’t know how much I’ll believe,” Ann told them. “But—but I’ve got to try. I’ve got to put aside everything I think I know and _try_. So lay it on me!”

And they did. Yuuki went over his first year with the app: how Akira had seemed surprised to find someone on the other side of the screen, and how they came to consider each other friends. Ryuji had never heard how he and Akira had met, but the bumbling Yuuki had made even Futaba crack a smile. Yusuke drew a quick sketch of Morgana for Ann to look at, and she wrinkled her nose at the combination of a butler suit and a bandanna.

Then Yuuki started on his second year with the app. How quickly everything was going to shit in that other universe, how he’d had no idea who Ren Amamiya was until the broadcast on the news—how even Akira didn’t know who he was, or why he was there, or who had put him there—and how afraid he’d been that if he tried to go to the police, they’d take his phone as evidence. Akira had needed him back then, and he’d needed Akira.

But, Ryuji noted, he didn’t say how much.

Yuuki’s third year with the app was where things got left out. Futaba frowned when he skipped mentioning how Ryuji had taken his phone. Yusuke stopped sketching when he was vague over nearly everything concerning Goro. Ryuji’s leg began to bounce when he made no mention of the Amamiyas visiting, or even of the missing posters and shrines Ryuji knew were still up in their town.

All of them shared a look when he said he was done before he even got to the end.

“Geez,” Ann said, soaking it all in anyway. It was only half of it. Part of it. “That is a lot. Now I see why you were so skittish, though, Mishima. If somebody tried to take Shiho from me like that, I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Y-yeah,” Yuuki said, one of his hands tracing the edge of a ring. He had to have bruises there by now. Ryuji wondered if they hurt.

They must not, because he collected up their cups and empty bottles and staggered back downstairs. Ryuji’s phone pinged, one chime after another, and he tugged it out of his pocket. Texts from Futaba, even though her face was flat and expressionless and gave away none of the anger that even Yusuke was showing.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why would he—”

“Maybe it’s hard to talk about,” Ryuji said, setting his phone to silent but leaving it on the table so Ann could see the stream of texts Futaba was sending at near-lightning speeds.

“What’s hard to talk about?” Ann asked, slowly.

“Akira dying, for one,” Ryuji said.

“Goro becoming a computer server,” Yusuke added.

 **Let’s not forget that Yuuki was technically connected to Akira’s shattered mind, either,** Futaba sent. **Or that Goro did it. Or that Akira was an emperor for a while, and that was why Goro did it.**

“Okay,” Ann said. “Can we slow down just a bit? My head’s starting to spin.”

“Or maybe that’s why he left it out,” Yusuke said. “It an awful lot to take in—would you like some water?”

“Please,” Ann said, staring at the table. Futaba’s texts stopped coming in large blocks and started being nothing but emojis and old-school emoticons. Shit, how old had they been when they last saw some of these?

Yusuke headed down into the cafe for her water. The three remaining stared holes into the table.

It really was a lot when Ryuji thought about it. Talking about it all even months after it was over had to be hard; maybe the fact that Yuuki’d cut the connection with Akira was what made it so hard. He had no proof—no Akira in his pocket—and maybe it was hitting him all over again, that he’d chosen to do so.

“Hey,” Ann said, after what felt like an eternity but was probably only twenty seconds. “Mishima said before—his app doesn’t work anymore. He left that out, too. Does—does he know why?”

“He made Akira cut the connection,” Ryuji told her, softly. “It was the only way Akira could get the help he needed to come home. It’s—it’s _really_ complicated.”

Futaba opened her mouth as if to argue but snapped it shut soon after. Yusuke came back up the stairs with glasses of water for each of them; Ann took hers and sipped at it, thinking. “So they can’t talk anymore. At all, you mean,” she finally said.

“And Akira can’t prove anything to us from his end anymore either, yeah,” Ryuji said.

“Wow,” she said with a wince. “I just—that is a lot. Like, a _lot_ a lot. You told me a lot, but also didn’t, and… Ugh. I can’t think like this.”

She pillowed her head in her arms. One of her pigtails waterfalled over the side of the table; the other headed in Ryuji’s direction until glittering golden strands tickled his knee.

Yusuke stared at him as he did his best impression of a fish gasping for air. Ann’s hair on his knee. Ann’s hair that was attached to her head that gave that brilliant smile—

Fuck.

He jerked to his feet. “I’m gonna—I’m gonna go for another snack run. You guys want anything?”

Futaba and Yusuke shook their heads. Ann mumbled out a _no, thanks_ into her arm.

Ryuji fled the cafe and didn’t go back until Futaba let him know it was okay to. He felt like a coward, running from Ann and the feelings she made him have that no other girl had before, and he felt even more like a coward when he found Yuuki waiting down in the cafe for him.

“Boss stepped out for some cigarettes,” he said, fiddling with something in his apron’s pocket. “Takamaki left a few minutes ago. You might be able to catch her if you want to say goodbye—”

“I think I like Ann,” Ryuji said, in the same tone as a drowning man begging for air might.

“Uh. Okay.”

“I can’t tell her goodbye ‘cause I might tell her I like her. More than like her. How the hell did you figure this out, anyway?”

“That you like Ann? I didn’t, you just told me,” Yuuki said. “But, if you meant how I figured out I liked someone—you were kind of there. I’m pretty sure you kept saying, _oh, shit,_ and Yusuke kept telling you to be quiet.”

“But how did you know you liked him back?”

Yuuki fiddled with whatever was in his pocket some more. Probably a pen and a notepad for orders. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just—I don’t. It feels like, even if I hadn’t said anything, I still would’ve wound up liking him. Loving him. You, uh, are talking about love, right? I’m not jumping to the wrong conclusion here, am I?”

Ryuji nodded. He flopped onto a bar seat, his legs feeling like wet noodles.

“Okay, then,” Yuuki said, with a nod. “I still would’ve wound up loving him, and it still would’ve been hard to let him go like that. I just wouldn’t have had a word for it if he hadn’t named it first.”

“But,” Ryuji said, “I mean, she’s not gonna come out and say it for me. That wouldn’t be cool of me to make her do that.”

“Sorry,” Yuuki said with a wince. “But, if it helps—sometimes it felt like he was going out of his way to do something _special_ for me. Something I’d like to see or do or—or hear. He’d sing lots of nonsense songs, and I think he knew I liked listening to them. If you want to do something special for her, you could try something like that.”

Sing nonsense? Ann would probably laugh at him—but she liked sweets. Loved sweets. Would probably be happy dying of a sugar coma.

“If you’re with someone you never want to lose,” Yuuki said softly into the silence between them, “they should know. Even if they don’t like you back the same way. They should know.”

“Makes sense,” Ryuji said. It did—even if Ann didn’t love him back, she’d know that he loved her. That there was a guy out there who loved her for who she was and not just for her looks, either. “But how did you know you liked him back?”

“Because he told me he didn’t want to be apart from me, ever,” Yuuki said. He wrangled the words through a throat that must not have wanted to say them—he sounded halfway to crying, and Ryuji belated realized why. “And I said I didn’t, either, because I _didn’t_. And know look where we are!”

Torn apart because they had to be. Torn apart because Yuuki had made one selfless decision to bring his boyfriend-husband-whatever back home.

Ryuji moved a stool over so he was sitting next to Yuuki, clutching at his rings and wrinkling his shirt. “Sorry,” he said, pulling those hands away.

“You didn’t do it.” Yuuki let him, and gripped him instead. “I did it. It was me.”

“He’ll come back,” Ryuji assured him, not sure whether it was a lie or not. He hoped not. Akira was everything to Yuuki, even if it didn’t look like it from the outside. “You said he loves you, and if he loves you, he’ll come back.”

Because if not, Ryuji was going to find a way to travel there and deck the guy for hurting his best friend and leading him along.

(Because if not, Ryuji wasn’t sure how Yuuki was going to keep living.)


	7. June, Part Four

Futaba wasn’t quite sure what to expect when her mom called her downstairs a few days after the talk they’d had with Ann. The only thing she knew was that Wakaba wanted to talk, and that meant Futaba had to comply, even if the thought of staring at each other across Sojiro’s coffee table made Futaba’s stomach clench with nerves.

She felt like she was going to throw up. Would throwing up get her out of the talk, or would it just delay it? Would Futaba wind up having to go through all of this again later, if she did?

Ugh. No. She didn’t want that.

But she didn’t want to take that last step down the stairs, either. She stood there, staring into Sojiro’s kitchen where she’d eaten breakfast just that morning and taken her pills like a good girl, completely none the wiser as to what the rest of the day would entail. Maybe if she’d thrown up then, she wouldn’t be here now, contemplating ways to throw herself down the last six inches of stairs to get out of talking.

Because if her mom wanted to talk, it meant talking about moving, or school, or moving schools when Futaba was finally kind-of-sort-of making friends. The guys in the computer club didn’t look at her like a creature with three heads anymore, at least, which meant it had to be a win, right?

“Futaba,” Sojiro said, coming out of the kitchen with mugs in his hands. “Are you alright?”

She shook her head no but said, “Yeah.” Just in case her mom was listening—which she had to be, because the living room was right there and the light was on and her mom’s shadow was on the wall, waiting impatiently.

Sojiro passed her a mug, freeing up a hand. He went for her shoulder but stopped partway there.

 _Don’t stop_ , she wanted to say. _Please don’t stop. I want you to. Show me that you’ve got my back, no matter what this is about. Please._

But she didn’t. Sojiro let his hand fall back to his side, and beckoned her to follow with a tilt of his head.

So she did. Sojiro had yet to lead her wrong, after all.

Wakaba sat right in the middle of Sojiro’s couch, papers spread out over the surface. Emails, Futaba saw. Dozens of them. She didn’t recognize half of the addresses, but she did see links to compressed files and cut-off sentences starting with _Regarding that data from the other day, Wakaba—_

“Futaba,” Wakaba said, “if you want a closer look you can sit down. Look them over.”

So she did. The call of curiosity was far stronger than the nervous clenching of her gut, and she sipped at her drink as Sojiro gave her mom a mug and then deflated into his recliner. He looked tired.

Her mom looked tired, too. They both wore the same heavy bags under their eyes, the same tilt to their mouths, even as Wakaba glared at the emails and sipped at her tea.

They spent several minutes in silence so deafening it made Futaba’s head ache. By the time she was rereading all of the emails a third time, it felt fit to fall off her shoulders to splatter on the floor like an overripe melon.

“So,” said her mom, “as you can see I’ve exhausted every colleague of mine for answers about your… data.” Absolute gibberish, Futaba heard. But if Wakaba wanted to be nice, fine. Futaba would let her. “And they’ve found nothing, Futaba. They scoured every inch of that data. An astrophysicist personally checked every combination of coordinates he could find in it, and came up with nothing. So—”

“It’s not a lie,” Futaba said.

“Well, it’s certainly nothing provable.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not true! How many people thought your research was phony until you started having results?”

“I had plenty of backers,” Wakaba said. “The Kirijo group was one of them, although I’m still not sure why. But that doesn’t mean that this and my research are the same thing—”

“They are, because it’s true.”

Wakaba sighed. It was heavy, and annoyed. “That was what the Amamiyas said when I called them to ask about it all. It was true, but they had no proof. They told me I just had to believe it was, and left it at that.”

“If you know that,” Futaba said, turning to face her mom, finally, for the first time since the party, “then why—”

“Because it’s not feasible!” Wakaba said. “Not even light travels instantaneously; for a mind to do so—for electrical signals to do so—do you realize what a breakthrough that would be? And, for that matter, how in the world did they manage to take whole _bodies_ , Futaba?”

Futaba turned back to the emails. They were filled with logic; no one ever fought back against numbers except when the numbers weren’t what they liked, and sometimes not even then.

But the app didn’t run on logic. Sure, it was programmed, but that was by an old quack of a scientist who probably wound up shoving tons of magic into it: magic to make it work the way he wanted it to; magic to make it work the way it needed to, magic subtly different from the one that dragged Akira and Goro all the way to another dimension. To a dying planet.

… To a _dead_ planet, Yuuki had muttered at some point. She thought he had. She couldn’t be sure.

But, if that was true—

“I need to make a phone call,” she said, and ignored Wakaba’s protests as she raced back up the stairs to her room and her phone charging innocently by her computer. Then she raced back downstairs while her fingers picked out Yuuki’s number, and she was back in front of the table with Wakaba’s emails spread out in front of her.

“I need a pen,” she said, turning several of them over. Sojiro passed her a blue one; she uncapped it with her teeth, spat the cap out, then realized she could just put Yuuki on speakerphone so her hands were free.

She doodled on the backs of the papers until he picked up. “Futaba?” he asked. “What’s going on? You don’t usually call so late.”

“Sorry, but this is important! I was thinking about some stuff, and I started thinking about the app, and, well—” How should she put it? That her mom was sitting right next to her while she had an epiphany? “Okay,” she told herself. “Calm down. NPC, when those first guys took Goro—what did they need him for?”

“Planetary migration. I thought I told you this.”

“You did! It’s just, y’know, how’d they get a whole planet full of people to move that easily?”

She thought she heard a thump on the other side of the call. Had he knocked something over? Put something down? “They were all on a ship like the one Akira’s on,” he finally said, after a while. “But in Goro’s case he had enough energy to maintain the artificial wormhole until the ship passed through. Apparently that whole planet was used up, though; that’s why it was supposed to be a last-ditch effort this time around.”

Artificial wormholes. Uh-huh, sure—except that Yuuki had mentioned something going wrong with Akira’s. Akira had made an artificial wormhole. Futaba didn’t even get to _see_ it.

She set that aside, drawing circles on her papers. The unknown first planet. Ra Ciela. The unknown third planet. “It got used up? What’s that mean?”

“It was turned into energy to fuel the ship and the wormhole. Did I really not tell you this? Why are you asking, anyway?”

She ignored his questions. “What happened to it when it got used up?”

“It disappeared, like Ra Ciela did. Everything on it turned into energy; I guess that’s just how it works.”

“It disappeared,” she muttered, staring at her diagram. She crossed out the first circle, then the second. If they needed that much energy to move a ship and operate a wormhole long enough to get it through, how much energy would they need to pull a soul over from another dimension?

“I don’t know,” Yuuki said. She hadn’t realized she had said it out loud. He hesitated before asking, “Seriously. Why are you asking me this?”

She drew stick figures, one smaller than the other: Akira and Goro. “Well, I was just thinking about it and couldn’t remember exactly what you said. But if they needed energy to do the planet migration or whatever, they’d need energy to take kids, too. Right?”

“Yeah,” he said slowly. Across the table Sojiro leaned forward in his chair, one hand on his goatee like stroking it would give him all the answers. Wakaba glared down at Futaba’s awful drawings.

“So where’d they get the energy from?”

“I don’t know,” Yuuki said.

“Do you think it’s possible that they got the energy from—”

“Don’t,” he interrupted.

“Huh?”

“Don’t,” he said, firmer. Almost like he was holding back anger and wishing he could lash out. “Don’t say it.”

“Why not?”

Sojiro was shaking his head, now, covering his face with his hands, rubbing away the wrinkles setting in there. Wakaba frowned at her drawings, or at the emails, or just in thought.

It was hard to tell, sometimes.

“Because we’re all hoping they’ve got something to come back to,” Yuuki said, “and if you say it I’ll start thinking it’s true and I don’t want to. Okay? I don’t want to. The Amamiyas don’t want to. Ms. Akechi doesn’t want to. We want to think they’ve got something to come back to because then they can come back. That’s all we want, Futaba.”

“Oh,” she said, scribbling down a pair of stick figures anyway. Akira and Ionasal; Goro and whatever weird person he’d taken over on that first planet. “I, uh—okay. I just, you know, thought I’d double check. That’s all.”

“I have to go, now,” Yuuki said, though his voice was choked. He hung up before she could say goodbye, which stung a little, but she’d apologize in the morning and hope everything would go back to normal.

“Futaba,” Sojiro said, when her phone screen went dark. “Don’t tell me you really think that.”

“There’s no way to be sure,” she said, crossing out one pair of stick figures. If the energy of a celestial body could fuel a rocket ship through a wormhole _and_ said wormhole, surely the energy needed to steal a soul from another dimension was much, much lesser. Enough that a single human body and whatever they were carrying at the time could fuel it.

Well, it would explain a lot.

“Would someone like to explain all of that to me?” Wakaba asked.

“Well,” Sojiro coughed, “the simplest explanation is that it’s magic and outside of our realm of understanding. At least, that’s how I’ve been thinking about it.”

“You can’t be serious. Magic, really?”

Akira had woven songs that had conjured lotuses to keep a small town safe from the increasingly-malevolent sun. It definitely sounded like magic, including bonding with a familiar.

“Cognitive psience’s whole shtick depends on people believing they can and making it happen,” Futaba told her. “If enough people believe in magic, why can’t it be real?”

“My research has nothing to do with magic!”

Futaba stood up, resisting the urge to stamp her foot and make her listen. Wakaba only wanted proof—proof that they couldn’t give anymore. She clutched her pen and the bundle of papers with her drawings on them and her phone and wondered what she could ever say to make someone so utterly stubborn _listen_. “It could, if you wanted it to,” was the only retort she could think of, and then she fled the room.

Her mom’s voice rang in her ears long after she was safely in front of her computer again, going through Ren Amamiya’s disappearing act frame by frame with the Featherman soundtrack blasting through her headphones.

Futaba sunk into her chair and tried to ignore it.

* * *

“Let her go, Wakaba,” Sojiro said. Wakaba was halfway to the stairs, Futaba’s feet pounding their way up them, and she turned, some kind of argument on her lips. “She needs time to process all of this, as well as how she’s hurt her friend’s feelings. It’s obvious that she did, even if she didn’t mean to.”

He sighed. Wakaba stared at him like she was looking at a stranger.

“Help me make dinner. I’ll tell her you helped. It might help things get better a bit quicker.”

She kept staring at him. He raised a brow at her. What? Was he supposed to let her go and pound on Futaba’s door until her daughter was too afraid to leave it even to go to the toilet? Was he supposed to let her bully Futaba into talking?

“Or,” he said, “you can sit here and think about everything we’ve talked about.”

“Sojiro, this isn’t some game,” Wakaba said. “You can’t—can’t just go along with it because it’s harmless. These are missing kids we’re talking about, and my daughter knows something about it—”

“Not enough,” Sojiro said.

“It doesn’t matter how much she does or doesn’t know! The only thing that matters is that she knows _something_! That’s all anyone will ever remember her for, when this gets out!”

“But it won’t,” Sojiro said. “The Amamiyas have called off the search. Their son is technically dead to the world, now. Goro Akechi has been missing for so long the only ones who thinks he can still be found are his mother and well-wishers. Who’s going to believe that aliens took them, and from right where they stood, and without a UFO in sight?”

“Sojiro—”

“Wakaba, listen. Let it go, or you’ll be the reason she goes through something else awful. Let it go, or you’ll be the reason she gets dragged to the police and questioned like a common criminal. Do you want that?”

“Of course I don’t,” Wakaba said. “God, it would ruin her future. I’d never. But you have to understand—if she’s going to keep talking about this, if she’s going to send my colleagues nonsense like that, _I’m_ the one who has to have an explanation. Not—not you.”

“Why not me?”

“Because I’m her mother!”

He nodded. All those questions he’d been peppered with trying to get Futaba into that rehab center and he’d barely been able to answer. No known father. Mother abroad for work. No, he didn’t know a thing about either of their’s medical history. No, he didn’t have a clue who Futaba’s father could be.

It definitely wasn’t him, he’d grimaced. Definitely not.

(Because if it was him he’d know, and the damn papers in his bedroom wouldn’t be sitting in his nightstand drawer. The damn papers wouldn’t even exist, if it was him.)

He didn’t say anything he wanted to: that Wakaba wasn’t around for the past five years, that she let Sojiro practically raise her daughter, that despite all of his attempts to tell her what was going on she only ever talked about her research. Sojiro hadn’t wanted to ruin her good cheer with Futaba’s problems, and Wakaba had barely asked after her, anyway. As if she knew, somehow, that something wasn’t right and was determined to ignore it.

Well, she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Sojiro stared her in the eye until she looked away.

“Help me make dinner,” he said again.

“You know I’m no good at cooking,” Wakaba said, and had the nerve to look abashed.

Ten years ago he would have loved that look. Now he was just tired. “Then cut and wash,” he offered, and moved past her to the kitchen. “That attitude’s the reason Futaba’s been living off of instant noodles. She needs real food, Wakaba, not just something she can pop in the microwave. Understand?”

“I suppose,” she said, though her tone suggested that she didn’t like it.

“Futaba helps me cook on the weekend,” he said, pulling out pots and pans. “Nothing complicated, and even someone who can’t cook can make a salad.”

“You think I’m an awful mother,” Wakaba said, still in the living room.

“I’m wondering how you could have put your research before your daughter,” he said. “I’m wondering what she thinks of being second to your pet project. She doesn’t have to come first all the time, Wakaba, but when it mattered you made it clear where your priorities lay.”

“I couldn’t take her with me to a completely different country! She can barely talk to kids her own age here, much less ones in a different language!”

“I know that,” Sojiro snapped. “You don’t think I don’t know that? But when she tells me she’s hearing voices—that they’re telling her she’s worth less than the paper her mother scribbles on and tosses aside everyday—what am I supposed to think? How could she come to that realization if she didn’t have a cause to?”

“You think I—she was hearing _voices_? And you didn’t _tell_ me?”

“You never asked,” he said, knowing it was a flimsy excuse. Just because she never asked didn’t mean he shouldn’t have told her. Just because she never asked didn’t mean he could pretend it wasn’t happening. She had a right to know what was going on with Futaba; she was her mother, after all.

That didn’t mean Sojiro had to like it anymore.

“You—you took her to see someone, didn’t you? Did the money I was sending you cover it? Is she still going?”

“Of course I took her to see someone,” Soijiro told her, eyeing the stairs. Was that a trick of the light, or was that Futaba at the top, listening in? “And no, it didn’t all cover it. I had to pull from my own savings for a while, but it was worth it to see her okay again.”

Wakaba groaned out something unintelligible, then collapsed into a dining chair. The mess of ingredients Sojiro had been pulling out of the fridge sat there, waiting, so he started cooking while she thought it out. Chopped up lettuce and tomatoes and onions, separated the ground meat into sections by hand, rubbed in seasonings or a splash of vinegar or oil where it needed it. Futaba liked salt; she also liked vinegar in her salads. Lots of vinegar. Said it covered the taste of all the green stuff and then grinned at him like it was a joke, which it probably was.

He didn’t get some of her jokes, but that was life. Society thought up new things that were funny every day, and Sojiro couldn’t keep up anymore.

“But,” Wakaba eventually said into her hands, “is she still going? Is she still—talking to someone about it? About hearing things?”

Sojiro set the meat to simmer and watched oil jump in the pan. “Whenever she needs new medication, that’s when she has to go. She said she wanted to. Sometimes there are things she won’t want to talk about with you or me or her friends, and that’s what the therapist is there for, Wakaba.”

“Medication,” Wakaba said softly. “My daughter needs medication.”

“Don’t you dare say it’s making her normal,” he warned.

She shook her head. “Nothing could make Futaba ‘normal.’ ‘Normal’ is entirely based on a societal structure; it needs it to survive, and every few years or so, ‘normal’ changes. I just—I just wish I’d seen it. If I’d been around more, would she have asked me for help?”

Futaba’s voice had been so small in his ear. _Is it true? Do you want me to die?_

“I don’t know,” he said. “Mix that salad, would you?”

She took the tongs and the bowl and half-heartedly fluffed the lettuce up. The tongs kept slipping the farther she tried to dig them; the more they slipped, the more upset she became.

Sojiro let her cry over the bowl. No one had ever gone to the hospital over tears in their salads, and Futaba liked salt.

“God, Futaba,” the woman he used to love cried. “God, I’m so sorry. What can I do, Sojiro? What can I do now to make it better?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “If I did, I would have done it by now.”

She nodded at that. “You would. She loves you. You’re like a father to her. If I tried to make her leave here, she’d fight me, I think. She loves you. You’re what she needed all along.”

He didn’t say anything to that. It wasn’t entirely true: after Wakaba moved he’d thought the best thing for Futaba was to let her do whatever made her the most comfortable, and that had turned into her almost never leaving her room. She’d been scared to come downstairs to make her noodles; she’d been scared to go to the bathroom.

And Sojiro had let her live like that for almost three years. Sure, he’d helped her when it mattered, and gave her whatever she asked for, but that didn’t excuse how hands-off he’d been, or how he’d never pushed her, or how he’d never confronted her about another cup noodle wrapper in his trash can. She’d been like a ghost in his house, there but not, until the day she asked if he wanted her to die.

There was a difference between spoiling children and loving them. Sojiro didn’t know where or what it was, but he was sure he’d spoiled her for a while. If that was what she needed, Sojiro was more than happy to give it to her.

“Just mix the salad, Wakaba,” he said, and focused on the stove.

Everything else could come later.

* * *

Yuuki stared at his phone and resisted the temptation to throw it against a wall; there was nothing he could do to take back what Futaba said, and nothing he could do to unhear it, so he stared instead. Dinner was cooling on the table in front of him: omelet rice, though he found he no longer had the appetite for it.

She was right, in a way, even if he didn’t want to consider it. If the Ra Cielans hadn’t given up anything to perform the song that dragged Akira’s soul to their dimension, the price would have had to be paid here, in blood and bone and flesh.

He hoped it wasn’t true.

He hoped it didn’t hurt.

He hoped to go back in time and not answer his phone for once. He hoped, if Akira ever returned, it was to a time where his body still existed—maybe before his parents kicked him out, or even better, before his arrest—so he could come and find Yuuki no matter where he was.

Akira didn’t know what he looked like, but that didn’t matter: Akira had promised he would come back, no matter how long it took, and Yuuki latched onto that promise like a drowning man clinging to the wreckage of his ship.

He had to believe in that promise. He had to.

* * *

Ryuji paced in front of Shibuya Station. Some dick with a megaphone was going on and on about a Sun God, or something, but the noise only went in one ear like a cactus and back out the other much the same.

He scowled at the guy. His wimpy assistant hid behind his sign; Sun God guy got even louder, if that was even possible.

It was like the universe was telling him he should cancel. Tell Ann he came down with a sudden case of—of nausea, or diarrhea, or a bad migraine, and that they probably shouldn’t meet right now.

Even if Ryuji was supposed to give her the rest of the complicated story she’d been promised. Even if Yusuke’s voice in his head hadn’t been reminding him that Ann was gorgeous and was likely to get a boyfriend the longer she stayed in Tokyo. Even if Yuuki hadn’t told him outright to tell her.

“Fuck,” he muttered. The word felt good.

“Wow,” Ann said, right behind him. He spun; his stomach dropped to his feet. “I’ve never heard you say that before.”

“Yeah, well,” he said, scuffing his shoe on the pavement. He couldn’t look at her, out here in the early-summer sun that made her hair shine like molten gold. Even in simple designer jeans and a t-shirt she looked good. “Let’s—uh, let’s get going.”

“Lead the way,” she urged, and they set off down the street. He’d been to this sweets shop a couple of times since his talk with Yuuki—always just to window shop and eye the tables, just so he could look confident when he led her in—and his feet traced the path through muscle memory alone.

Okay. Maybe it wasn’t just a couple of times.

They got there and seated just fine. He let her go pick out some cake while he looked for something a little heavier and found some plain fried dough dusted with cinnamon. It was the least fancy-looking, least sweet thing in the entire place aside from the water and the napkins, and Ryuji wasn’t about to eat paper.

Still, though. It wasn’t easy getting through the rest of it: that Akira had suffered and suffered; that Goro had suffered, too; that Yuuki had been so damn protective of his phone and his connection to Akira he hadn’t wanted to do anything with anybody else for nearly half a year. Ann nodded and ignored her cake for most of it, only occasionally taking little bites like she was trying to look dainty like all the other girls in the cafe, and Ryuji wolfed down his little dough sticks in record time, trying to busy his mouth so he wouldn’t have to talk so much.

“So how’d you get him to meet with you guys?” Ann asked at last. “If he was glued to his phone and didn’t want to hang out, I mean.”

Ryuji grabbed his cup. “I took it. His phone.”

Ann stared. He took a sip; all that was left was ice cubes. Fuck.

“You took his phone,” Ann said slowly.

“Yeah.”

“You took it from him. Like—how? Did you ask? Did you find it, because he left it somewhere?”

“‘taba was real sure he had something to do with it all,” Ryuji said. “And after how he acted at the rehab center, Yusuke ‘n me were pretty sure, too. I wanted to ask him about it, but every time I sent him an invite to go do something, he never answered, or he said he was busy. I got fed up with it.”

Ann was staring at him. Light glinted off the sunglasses perched on her head; he couldn’t stand the way she was looking at him anymore, like she didn’t know him at all.

Well. Ryuji could fix that.

“I got fed up with it,” he repeated, “so I went to his house and tried to make him talk, but he didn’t want to. It pissed me off, then he got pissed off. He tried to run, Ann, but he tripped over his own effing chair ‘n the next thing I knew I was—”

Ann, at least, was quiet while he thought of the best way to put it. Nothing worked. “—fightin’ him, right there on his floor. But I took it from him. He gave up at the end and told me to to take it and leave, but I took it. I shouldn’t have.”

“You thought you were doing the right thing,” Ann said. “I mean—nobody could’ve known that he didn’t really have anything to do with it, and he wasn’t talking about it to anybody. You couldn’t have known, Ryuji.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but that don’t make it right.”

“It doesn’t, no. But he’s forgiven you for it, right? I mean, you guys’re friends now!”

“Yeah,” he said, though he didn’t want to. He and Yuuki were friends now—best friends, Ryuji had said so himself—but sometimes it didn’t feel like it. Sometimes it felt like all Ryuji was doing was trying to backpedal on that damn day and failing, hard. Sometimes it felt like Ryuji would spend the rest of his life trying to atone for other things—not understanding Futaba enough, getting on Yusuke’s nerves too much, all the shit with Kamoshida and the track team and his ma.

Ann must have sensed his hesitation. She frowned at him. “You guys talked about it, right?”

“Yeah.”

“But it’s still bothering you.”

Ryuji winced, choosing to stare at the dusting on cinnamon on his plate. “Yeah,” he admitted, though it wasn’t much of an admission if she figured it out herself. He tried explaining. “It’s just—you know I don’t think much when I get mad like that. ‘N then after, all I’ve got left is feeling shitty for being so—so impulsive. So angry. Like, I know I shouldn’t think I can’t get mad over shit, but it’s different when I hurt everybody when I am.”

Not to mention what Yuuki had done near the end—what he’d clearly been trying to do, as if offering Ryuji his body for the night or forever or whatever meant that Ryuji would just drop the subject. Not to mention what he’d said, either.

“He said I was like Kamoshida,” Ryuji told Ann. “He said I just wanted to get off on a power trip or something. He said it like he knew what I wanted, when all I really wanted was his damn phone, and I took it anyway.”

“Ryuji,” Ann said, though it was clear she had nothing more to say. Maybe she was rethinking spending more time with him.

He would too, if he found out how shitty a former friend of his actually was.

Ryuji hunched over his plate, staring at the glitter of sugar crystals, absolutely sure that this would be the end of it. Ann would realize how goddamn awful a person he was and would get up and leave. She’d block his number. She’d pretend she never knew him. She’d turn the other way on the street if she saw him, the same way the track team did whenever they saw each other at school.

And when she did get up and walk away, he let the feeling course through him: guilt, hot and burning in his veins. Bit his lip hard enough to nearly draw blood to avoid crying out because this time he’d actively driven someone away.

He let himself feel like shit, taking up space in a trendy dessert buffet where all the other tables were full of girls whispering about him. Told himself he’d only be a minute sitting there so Ann could put as much distance as possible between them before he left, too. A waitress came around and refilled their glasses and Ryuji didn’t have the heart to tell her not to, that he wasn’t staying much longer.

Someone put a plate down on his table. He looked up, fully aware he was glaring because damn it, didn’t a guy deserve a little space after all that—then felt his jaw drop in shock.

Ann hadn’t left. She thanked the waitress for the refills then smiled at him, fork already poised over a slice of strawberry shortcake sans the strawberry on top, and he wondered whether she ate it on the way back to the table before realizing it was on a second plate with more of those cinnamon dough sticks.

Weren’t the strawberries on the top supposed to be the good part, the part every girl saved for last? Why would she give it to him, of all people?

“You’re not like Kamoshida,” Ann said, watching him stare like an idiot. “Kamoshida was an asshole, plain and simple, and you’re not. Kamoshida wouldn’t have felt this guilty over taking a student’s things—he wouldn’t have felt guilty taking his own colleague’s things, except if it hurt his reputation. Trust me, I dated the guy for over a year. He boasted about breaking your leg to me, you know. You’re nothing like him. _Nothing_.”

“I—but, I—”

“No buts, Ryuji. You’re nothing like him, end of story. You’ve just got an anger problem. It’s nothing some therapy or classes can’t help you manage.”

Therapy. Classes. He didn’t have the money for either right now, not with tuition and Yuuki’s ring’s payments eating through his earnings. His ma would help him pay for them, but that would just be another load for her to carry, and she already did too much for a son that didn’t deserve it.

“I’m serious,” Ann said, softly, and pushed the plate with the dough sticks closer. The strawberry gleamed red like freshly-spilled blood. Syrup threatened to take over the plate.

He stuffed a stick in his mouth just so he wouldn’t have to look at Ann or her expression or her goddamn hair shining like a fucking star in the middle of the sea of night.

God damn it, he was starting to sound like a poet. What the fuck.

“You don’t have to do it right now, if you can’t afford it,” Ann went on. “But you should. Eventually, before it gets out of hand and then you can’t find a job or something. In the meantime, though, you should really talk to Mishima about it again. If it’s still bothering you, you might just need to… I don’t know, reconfirm that it’s not bad blood between you guys? Or maybe it seemed like you guys talked it out, but really all you did was sweep it under a rug. It can’t hurt.”

“You think so?” he asked.

“Shiho and I fought a lot after… well, you know,” Ann said. “When she was in the hospital, and all we had was time to talk. I ran away plenty of times, but I still went back to her. She’s my best friend. I don’t think anything could’ve kept us apart for very long, but when I thought of her dying and being gone forever, it just made me sad—and angry, too. It felt like she didn’t even think of me when she was—was deciding whether or not to go through with it.”

That had been Yuuki’s reaction, too, when Ryuji took his phone. Anger, then resignation because Yuuki was too damn weak to fight for what he wanted to protect, and he knew it. Ryuji could have kept that phone forever, and Akira would never have gotten the chance to come home. Hell, he never would have gotten the chance to tell Yuuki he loved him.

Ryuji would have taken all of that away. He could have taken it.

But that was the difference between him and Kamoshida: he’d gone back and returned what he’d taken, asked for forgiveness Yuuki and Akira didn’t need to give.

“You really love her, don’t you?” he asked.

“Well, yeah,” Ann grinned. “She _is_ my best friend.”

“Not like that,” he shook his head. “Like—what you said, Yuuki did that, too. ‘N when he got his phone back he and Akira confessed to each other. You can tell me if you guys did, too, you know.”

“Wait a sec,” Ann said, “you think Shiho and I are… together? Like a couple?”

“Half the school thought it.”

“And—and you think we’re together because our making-up story sounds like how Mishima got together with Akira.”

He shrugged. What was he supposed to think, that the two of them really were that good of friends? He could hope so, but he wasn’t sure whether it was true or not.

She leaned back, crossing her arms and glaring, indignant that he’d even suggest it. “And I guess when you and Mishima make up, you’re going to be together, too?”

“What? Of course not!”

“That doesn’t match what you just said.” She sighed. She still looked pissed, even as her tone softened. “People can be friends—even good friends—without hooking up. You know it. I know it. I can’t believe you thought Shiho and I were together.”

He winced and stuffed another dough stick in his mouth. Chewing would mean he wouldn’t have to talk, which meant he wouldn’t get another chance to shove his foot in his mouth instead.

“Well, whatever,” Ann said, and finished off the last of her cake. “But wow, poor Yusuke. I can’t imagine what he’s going through right now. Has he talked to you about it?”

“Uh, no?” What the hell was she talking about? The only thing Yusuke had brought up lately was his art classes and his job at the florist’s. “But if it’s art shit he knows I’m no good to talk to about it. He says I’m _unrefined_.”

“Well, it could be art stuff, but I was talking more about—” She shook her head. Her hair went flying. “—actually, if he hasn’t told you, maybe I shouldn’t. I don’t think he’d want it getting around.”

“He’s the former student of a famous plagiarist,” Ryuji snorted. “Not much could be worse than that. What wouldn’t he want getting around?”

But Ann shook her head again. She gathered up her plate and headed back to the buffet; Ryuji chased strawberry syrup around his plate with the last dough stick and made a face at how sweet it tasted. The strawberry itself was going to be worse—but he had to eat it, or Ann’s offering would go to waste.

Plus, he had a feeling there was some unspoken taboo about not eating the strawberry. Ryuji didn’t want to break it and make Ann hate him for some stupid slight he hadn’t known existed.

As Ann perused tiramisu and chocolate cake slices, Ryuji wondered what the hell she’d meant. What could Yusuke be so upset over that he couldn’t tell his friends? Was something going on with that Nakanohara guy, or their apartment, or even with his job or classes? Was he stressed with too much work?

Ryuji would have to call him later. Make some time for them both to go out for ramen or beef bowls so they could talk if Yusuke wanted to. Food, he knew, always made everything better, even the low blows. His ma had softened up the news of Ryuji’s scholarship being rescinded with chicken stir-fry, but Ryuji had known it was just a matter of time, back then.

Maybe it was just his ma, then, making sure he got something to eat even when things weren’t looking so great. Better than before, where her choices had been between enough food or the electricity bill. Better than before, where every scrap of food could have been his last for the day because his damn dad _had_ to watch TV while he drank his paychecks away.

But it worked, didn’t it? Talking over stale cookies and tea. Talking over too-sweet cake. Talking over curry and drinks at Leblanc. Talking while their stomachs filled up and their defenses fell down with each bite.

And, well. Ryuji just liked food.

“Sorry,” he said when Ann finally came back. The cake on her plate looked like it had vegetables in it. He wondered what the world had come to, that people put vegetables in cake. “About sayin’ that about you and Shiho.”

“We _are_ close, so I guess I can see how people might come to that conclusion,” Ann said. “But she’s really just my best friend. She’s almost like a sister to me. I’ve told her things I would never tell my own parents, and she’s done the same.”

“And you can’t, you know, give me a hint? About Yusuke?”

She thought it over while licking frosting off her fork. Ryuji had never wanted to be an eating utensil, but he was starting to see the appeal. “I’ll just say that when you said Mishima and _Akira_ were the ones going out, it was really surprising.”

“What’s that mean?”

But she didn’t answer. She ate her cake, eyeing the strawberry still on his plate until he slid it over and let her have it back.

Yuuki and Akira—well, yeah, it was surprising. Akira was a guy trapped in another dimension. For all they’d known at the time, he was just a really sophisticated AI. That he’d fallen for Yuuki was kind of surprising on its own; that Yuuki had fallen right back was the part that Ryuji couldn’t understand some nights until he told himself that even if Yuuki had tried to be normal like the rest of them he would have miserable. Ryuji liked him better now that he wasn’t hiding shit all the time; Ryuji liked him better now that they could actually talk like they were friends, instead of having to listen to Yuuki make shit up to act _normal_.

But Ann didn’t seem the type to get hung up over her friends being gay. Ann didn’t seem the type to get hung up over much at all, letting all her problems roll right off her back before they became too heavy to bear.

But then, what? What about Yuuki and Akira being together was so damn surprising? What about Yusuke being upset about it? _Was_ he upset about it, or was it something else entirely?

Ryuji really didn’t know. He was grasping at straws when he muttered, “Don’t tell me he likes Akira, then.”

“Not Akira,” Ann confirmed with a shake of her head. “Are you ready to go? I really shouldn’t eat anymore—the rest of the buffet is so _tempting_ —so we should go.”

“You only had three slices,” Ryuji said, taking stock of their plates. Two for him, three for her, and he’d expected her to pile as much as she could on each one. “And what’s that mean, not Akira? You can’t be telling he likes Yuuki.”

But Ann smiled, brilliant despite the crumbs. He didn’t think the crumbs would ever be a problem. “Yes, three slices. I’m a model, remember? I need to start acting like one, and that means not eating so much cake. And I meant what I said: not Akira. You can ask him the rest yourself.”

Ryuji didn’t think that would go so well. But he had to try, had to prove her wrong because she seemed so damn sure and it couldn’t be—not Yusuke, who he’d joked would rather fuck paintings over people.

He felt like an ass.

He was halfway home before he realized: all that talk about love and who felt it, and he hadn’t talked about his own for her.

Ryuji groaned. It was just his luck that life refused to be easy and simple—but that was okay, because how could he tell her he liked her after spilling his guts about what a shitty person he was? What kind of asshole would give someone a list of every awful thing they’d ever done and then gone, “Would you go out with me?”

It was a recipe for disaster. It was a complete waste of her time.

But Ryuji still collapsed once he was safely in his room, wishing he’d had the guts to say it.

* * *

Ryuji wasn’t quite sure how to phrase the talk he wanted to have with Yusuke the right way, and his homework was gradually piling up, so he did what he usually did: he headed for Leblanc, bag heavy with textbooks and his phone weighing down his pocket.

It should have been easy, he thought as he greeted Boss and sat down: text Yusuke asking to talk; don’t mention that he knows about Yusuke’s crush on Yuuki; get Yusuke to decide if he wanted to meet up to talk or whether they’d chat over the phone.

But it didn’t seem right. Ryuji wasn’t sure what about it didn’t seem right, but blunt and direct were probably his best options. If Yusuke was determined to hide it, Yusuke could probably hide anything from anyone.

That was how he’d gone so long without anyone noticing, after all.

Ryuji tucked his head down to his homework and scribbled down answers, and before long he was halfway through the pile. Boss was perched on his usual seat, muttering his way through a crossword puzzle.

“Shoot,” he said, breaking Ryuji out of homework tunnel vision.

“What?” Ryuji asked.

“Outta smokes again,” Boss said, frowning at the pack in his hand. He glanced at the clock; Ryuji did, too, and noted that they were still in the middle of Leblanc’s slowest hours. No one usually wanted coffee or curry at three in the afternoon, and no one had come in after Ryuji did.

“So go get some more,” Ryuji said. “I can watch the place while you’re gone. Shouldn’t be too long, yeah?”

“You don’t even work here, kid,” Boss said. He still undid his apron and hung it up and was out the door without much fuss, the small grin on his face belying how much he appreciated the offer.

Well, it wasn’t like Ryuji hadn’t done it before. As long as no one minded not having coffee, he’d watch the place.

Naturally as soon as Boss turned the corner and Ryuji was trying to get back to his homework, the door jingled open.

“Be right with ya,” Ryuji called, and wondered how weird it would be for him to leave his homework scattered around the tabletop. Probably weird, but it would be too much effort to clean up.

“Oh,” said a distinctly familiar voice Ryuji was beginning to think was determined to haunt him, “it’s you again, Sakamoto.”

“Prez.” Nothing else he wanted to say would be much good for Leblanc’s business, so he bit his tongue. “You here for more curry?”

“I am. One regular. Can you still not make coffee?”

“Nope,” he said, gesturing for her to sit. She took the spot closest to Boss’s seat, where the crossword puzzle book still sat, and started paging through it.

“That’s alright,” she said. “The soda you gave me last time worked well with it. Do you have any more?”

She fiddled with her sleeve. She wasn’t dressed like she’d just rolled out of bed like last time, but it still wasn’t prim-and-proper Makoto Niijima. If he hadn’t seen it before, he would have never realized that even she owned t-shirts, much less slightly worn jeans and sneakers with dirt tracked all over the bottom.

“Didn’t think you liked soda.”

“Every so often, it’s not so bad,” she admitted, with her own private smile, like they were sharing a joke. It was weird, if Ryuji was being honest, but as he scooped up rice on a plate she took note of the books piled on his table. “Were you in the middle of studying? I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

“Taking breaks is good for you,” Ryuji said. “Although—you know this is the second time you’ve come here while Boss is out? What’s with that?”

“I suppose I’m just not meant to try his coffee. Doctor Takemi praises it so highly whenever I help out, and I thought I would finally give it a try.” She wrote something down in Boss’s puzzle book and fiddled with the pen and her sleeve some more. “And, well, I suppose I wanted the chance to talk to you again. It might be vain of me, but I hoped you’d changed your mind.”

“Never,” Ryuji said, putting her plate down a little too harshly. “You coulda done something, but you wanted approval first? You know that’s the hardest thing to actually get, right?”

“I know,” Niijima said. “But I have to keep trying, or I’ll only be proving that I haven’t changed, correct?”

“Don’t ask me.” He couldn’t look at her, at this new, slightly worn out Niijima. She looked like him. She looked like his ma.

“Alright,” she said, before shoveling her mouth full of curry. Ryuji turned to the fridge and its bottom shelf, full of drinks Leblanc didn’t actually have on the menu. He’d given Niijima cola last time, and he searched for one with the closest expiration date.

It would serve her right to get sick off of expired cola, though Ryuji’s stomach squirmed at the thought. Petty revenge wouldn’t do him much good now, and Boss took care of the stock in his fridge. The closest expiration date was sometime next month, so he grabbed one of those and made a cup of ice in case she was weird like Yusuke and didn’t like bottles.

He couldn’t remember if she drank it from the bottle, last time. He thought he gave her a cup of ice then, too, but he couldn’t remember if she’d used it or not.

He also couldn’t remember watching her shovel spoonfuls of curry in her mouth like she was Futaba. He couldn’t remember her wiping sauce off her cheek and then licking it off her finger.

“What?” she asked when she caught him staring.

“Uh,” he started, and plopped her cola and the cup down. “It’s just—you’re eatin’ like a starved animal. What gives?”

“I slept in late and missed breakfast,” Niijima stated. “All I’ve had so far is water, and Doctor Takemi won’t let me help her if I come in without eating again. She made it very clear after last time.”

She poured herself a cup of cola. There was dirt under her nails, and a series of cuts along the back of her left hand. Paper cuts, probably.

Ryuji couldn’t forgive her just because she looked pathetic, but curiosity won over his hate. “What do you help her with, anyway?”

“Medical trials. She’s developing a new medicine, and asked for my help in exchange for—well, for waiving the fee on a medicine I needed.”

“Musta been an expensive medicine,” he said.

“It was,” Niijima confirmed, “very expensive. But Doctor Takemi is very discreet, and she isn’t associated with any major hospitals. That’s why she can make deals like this. I don’t know what I would have done if she hadn’t offered to bargain for it.”

“What would you have done?”

Niijima stiffened at that, her expression darkening. Emotions flitted through her eyes: anger, despair, hopelessness, grief.

Ryuji didn’t know what to do with that. It wasn’t his business, anyway. “Never mind,” he said.

Niijima only nodded, going back to her meal with less gusto than before.

He didn’t know what to do with a customer sitting around, and he wound up pacing back and forth behind the counter. Niijima remained silent, focusing more on her food than on him, and he took the chance to study her again: bags under her eyes like she wasn’t sleeping enough; a dullness to her skin like she wasn’t taking care of it or didn’t have the time to; her hair was an oddly tangled mess, and there was a tiny bow clipped to a lock of it.

He wound up staring at it. It was too small to be meant for a girl, and he didn’t see former Miss Prez as the frilly purple bow type, anyway.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, catching him staring.

“Well, you gotta thing, right here—” He motioned to it. Niijima wasn’t even surprised; she touched it with that small, private smile on her face, and then took another drink. “You ain’t surprised or nothing?”

“It’s hard to be surprised when it was my turn to watch her this morning,” she said. “A good friend of mine has a child, you see, and when my sister disowned me, we started living together to save money, so we take turns watching her daughter and working. I hardly even feel it when Suzuna’s giving me a makeover anymore.”

A kid. A friend of Niijima’s—he didn’t remember her having friends, back at Shujin—with a kid. It felt bizarre. “How old is she?”

“She’ll be two years old in August. It’s kind of surprising, given how much she’s doing on her own. If you looked at her, you’d think she was older.”

Scratch that, it _was_ bizarre. “How the hell did you get to be friends with someone with a _baby_?”

Niijima looked between him and the table, thinking. She looked like she didn’t want to talk about it, and he was about to say that he didn’t care if she did or not when she said, “She came to me. She found me at one of my part-time jobs with everything she owned on her back and a baby in her arms. She used to go to Shujin, and she remembered me from there—and the lengths I went to, to make everyone around me happy. If there was anyone else she could trust with her child’s safety, it was me, she said. I thought it was strange, because no one trusted me then. But I didn’t have anything to lose by agreeing, so I did.”

Then she chuckled, dry and humorless. “Well, that, and I knew the law thanks to my sister. Although nothing I knew helped her, in the end.”

So somebody in trouble with the law had begged goody-two-shoes Miss Prez to help her out. Ryuji felt bad for the kid getting caught up in all this.

And he was starting to feel bad for Miss Prez, too.

It was stupid. He should hate her. He should hate the fact that she had every resource to help out the rest of her students and didn’t. He should hate the fact that she’d done nothing when it mattered, and then gotten herself arrested over something as fucking dumb as taking down the mafia.

But Ryuji couldn’t have done that. He hadn’t been willing to do anything it took to bring down Kamoshida, as if when the bastard broke his leg he broke any real fighting spirit Ryuji had. He hadn’t been able to do anything, and he was still pissed about it, because in the end it took someone almost dying—and a few good months of an investigation—to lock the asshole up.

When push came to shove, Ryuji had defended himself—and that was all. Niijima, in the pursuit of perfection or approval or whatever the fuck she’d been looking for, had defended everyone else. She was still defending other people, while Ryuji was worrying himself into a rage over something as dumb as asking one of his friends if he had a crush on the other.

Stupid. So fucking stupid.

“Look,” he said, before he could convince himself not to. “I can’t forgive ya for not doing anything back then. I just—just can’t. There was probably a bunch of shit going on that I don’t know about and I don’t want to. But the you sitting here in front of me right now is pretty damn cool. So, uh…”

“You don’t have to force yourself,” Niijima said.

“Nah,” he said. The more he thought about it, the more this, too, felt like fate. Destiny. Once was a coincidence, but twice? Twice she’d come in while Boss was out buying cigarettes, leaving them time to talk alone?

That didn’t feel like coincidence.

He tried to smile. It might have fallen a little flat, but Niijima returned it after a moment. “A delinquent Student Council Prez,” he said. “Who would have thought, huh?”

“The old me would be proud of what I’ve become, I think,” Niijima confessed. “I’m still helping others, just not in the way I thought I’d be doing it. And I think she’d be proud of you, too.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because you haven’t given up,” she said, looking over her shoulder at his books. “You’re still trying, despite everything you’ve been through, despite every reason you’ve been given to give up. I never thought you’d make it this far.”

“Maybe this far’s all I got in me.”

“It’s still farther than me. It’s still farther than my friend, too. You don’t have to, but I’d like it if you said you’d try to enjoy it while it lasts.”

“I don’t know if I can do that,” Ryuji admitted. College wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t that easy, either, especially not for him and his way of forgetting to study. There was a project in that pile he’d forgotten to start, and he wasn’t looking forward to it.

“Well,” said Niijima, scooping up the last bits of her meal, “even if you don’t, at least you’ll know for sure it’s not for you. That’s more than some people get, and I don’t mean to sound jealous when I say that. It’s just—sometimes, when you lose an opportunity, it’s gone for good.”

He bit down a retort—that the schooling was wasted on him anyway, that he wasn’t smart enough to be there, that he hadn’t even wanted to go—and just said, “Okay.”

Sometimes it was easier to agree just to avoid an argument, and Ryuji didn’t want to fight with Niijima again. It would be too damn easy to hate her for anything she said, and he couldn’t. Not right now, with a baby’s bow clip in her hair and a friend depending on her at home.

Niijima needed allies the same way Ryuji had once needed allies. Now he had his, and Niijima had next to none, and he couldn’t hate her for that.

But he still added, “Just don’t push it too much. I’m still not sure I even wanna be there.”

She only nodded and thanked him for the meal. Ryuji took her money and nodded goodbye when she left.

He got back to his homework a little lighter and a little heavier than before.

* * *

Yuuki was disturbed from working on his latest lab by someone knocking on the cubicle wall. He was sorry to admit that he jumped, one hand flying off the keyboard while the other ripped his textbook.

“Shit, sorry,” said his classmate. Yama-something. Yamada, maybe. He had a mole next to his eye, and Yuuki couldn’t help but stare at it before ripping his focus back to his textbook.

“It’s fine,” he said, smoothing out the crinkle in his newly-ripped page. He willed his voice not to shake, but it did anyway. “Did—did you need something?”

 _Please don’t say you need the desk_ , he almost begged. He was almost done, and the lab was due tomorrow, and Yuuki had finally found some time to finish it—he didn’t want to have to stop now. Working at his apartment was next to impossible these days, as the toddler upstairs had taken to stomping around while screeching at the top of her lungs. It was unpredictable when she would start up and what, if anything, would calm her down.

But the toddler mostly woke up early, leaving Yuuki with four or five hours of sleep a night, if he was lucky. He didn’t feel lucky. Whole chunks of his paychecks were going towards energy drinks, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had anything other than that to drink.

Boss’s coffee, being coffee, didn’t count.

“Yeah, actually,” Yamada said with a smile that dimpled his cheeks. “See, I’ve been organizing a mixer, and we’re short a guy. I thought maybe you’d want to come?”

A mixer. Yuuki almost laughed; before he met Akira he would have jumped on the chance to meet with girls and potentially score himself a date.

“Sorry,” he said. Yamada’s face fell, and he scrambled to explain himself. “It’s just—I’m not really looking for a girlfriend. That’s what mixers are for, right?”

“You can use them to start networking,” Yamada said. “But—I mean, if you really don’t want to…”

The problem was that Yuuki kind of did. He wanted to go out and enjoy himself, but he doubted how much of a good time he could have without one of his friends or Akira nearby. The last thing he wanted was to make a fool of himself in front of strangers and his own classmates.

Well, summer vacation was in a few weeks. They could have another party. He could properly catch up with Takamaki and sleep until he couldn’t anymore up in Leblanc’s attic and finally have that dinner with his dad that kept getting pushed back.

His fingers traced Akira’s ring. A few more weeks and he could do whatever for a week or two. “I’m sure,” he said.

“Well, alright,” Yamada said. But then he leaned in close, too close for Yuuki’s liking, and asked softly, “Would you want to come next time, then? If it’s just a networking mixer?”

“Sure,” Yuuki said, cursing the way his voice cracked. His face had to resemble a tomato; his cheeks burned. Yamada had to have noticed. “Okay.”

“Great,” Yamada cheered. His dimples came back; Yuuki was close enough to notice that his eyes took on a green tint before he backed off. “Next time, then.”

He walked off. Yuuki was left with nothing to do except wonder what the hell that had been about—why had Yamada gotten so close, dipped his voice so low, asked him so _nicely_ —

And why was Yuuki left wanting and breathless in his absence? Why did his heart stutter in his chest? Why was his face still burning?

He buried his face in his hands. Heat radiated off his cheeks; he dug his nails into whatever skin they could find, hoping the pain would help him calm down. It was just like that last week before graduation, when Akira hadn’t talked to him: he was being drawn in by every smile; enticed by every kind word; swallowed up by every action that should have a plausible explanation but that his mind was insisting was something else.

Yuuki wanted Akira back so badly it made him feel as if he was twisting himself apart at the seams. If Akira was here, Yuuki wouldn’t want anyone else. If Akira was here, Yuuki wouldn’t be reacting this way to normal conversation.

If Akira was here… but he wasn’t.

And that, too, was Yuuki’s fault.

He didn’t remember going home. One second he was sitting there, in blissful darkness as his knuckles pressed into his eyes, and the next he was blinking in the last of the evening sunlight, his messenger bag slung over a shoulder, the strap twisted and biting into him through his shirt. In the little courtyard garden one his his neighbors was tending the flowerbed; a toddler stood nearby, splashing her feet in a puddle and screeching with joy.

Then she looked up and noticed him. His feet felt frozen; she was so small, so fragile-looking. He’d looked like that once. So had Akira. So had Goro. Anything could happen to her and she would die, the same way that Goro and Akira had died, but unlike them, she wouldn’t come back.

She wouldn’t come back. Akira was likely to never come back. Goro was likely to never come back. If Suzui had died back then, she wouldn’t come back, either.

Something squeezed his leg. When he looked down, it was the toddler, rubbing her face on his jeans and making cooing noises. “Sha-sha,” she said, over and over again.

“Sha-sha,” he said, because it was a toddler. He was sure she wouldn’t understand if he said anything else, but she looked up and grinned at him and then went back to her ministrations.

Her mother finally looked over. “Oh, Suzuna, no,” she called. “Don’t bother the poor man. Come back to Mommy, okay?”

“Sha-sha!” the toddler called, as if it were an answer. She stamped her foot and clung tighter, digging her face in even more.

He wasn’t getting anywhere like this, much less up to his apartment where he could cry for as long as he wanted without anyone the wiser. Yuuki knelt down, vaguely remembering that toddlers were oddly perceptive. Maybe Suzuna had noticed he wasn’t feeling well, and was only trying to help.

“Can I have a hug, Suzuna?” he asked. Her mother was right there. If she didn’t want to, she could just run away.

“Ug!” Suzuna cried, and detached her (tiny, tiny) hands and reached up to him. Her eyes danced with glee.

(Would Akira’s dance like that, too, when he and Yuuki finally met?)

Compared to his laptop and plates of curry at Leblanc, Suzuna was light. She clung to his neck, her little arms barely wrapping all the way around. She cooed in his ear, her breath warm and her heart racing.

With no one around but a toddler and her mother, Yuuki let himself cry.


	8. June, Part Five

The thing about Yusuke was that when he didn’t want to be found, he couldn’t be found.

Ryuji tried texting and calling and never got a reply. He briefly considered stalking his college campus for the guy until he realized that he’d stick out like a sore thumb among all those artsy-fartsy weirdos and probably get the cops called on him—provided he could actually find the place, since Yusuke had never told them which college he was even attending.

So Ryuji did the next best thing: he staked out the florist shop, giving a condensed version of events to the shopkeep and hoping she wouldn’t be too offended if he loitered in front of her store.

“He has been awfully distracted lately, and I can’t be sure he’ll be by today,” she said, before telling him she didn’t mind. Ryuji promised himself he’d buy a couple roses or something for his ma when he was done for the day, then settled down to wait. Futaba wasn’t churning out her mobile games as quickly anymore, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have a sizable list of them waiting for him to beta test, and it was in the middle of an Egyptian-style Candy Crash game that kept glitching his pieces that Yusuke finally showed up. Yusuke seemed more startled to see him than Ryuji liked.

“Dude, Yusuke,” Ryuji said, exiting out of the game and pocketing his phone. “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get in touch for days!”

“I’ve been busy,” Yusuke said.

“Too busy to text me back?”

“Yes, actually.” He at least had the sense to look ashamed about it. “I saw your messages and intended to reply, but then one thing came up, and then another, and another. I spent three hours just yesterday helping a classmate scrub spilled paint off the studio floor, I’ll have you know. It was not pleasant.”

“Okay,” Ryuji said, “and I’m sorry for hounding ya like this, but if you’ve got time now—”

“I have work,” Yusuke huffed.

His boss, the florist lady, called out gently. “Kitagawa, we all need a little rest from time to time, and your friend came all this way to see you. I don’t mind if you skip out for today.”

Yusuke looked like he wanted to argue but couldn’t find the willpower to. He sighed instead. “Very well, then.”

Ryuji couldn’t help but grin. Then he remembered the flowers he was going to buy and had a brief discussion with the florist; she was surprised he wanted to buy anything after all, but when he said they were for his ma, she seemed to understand. He wound up leaving with a small bouquet of bluebells and pansies, each flower somehow more delicate than the last, and definitely more delicate than roses.

“She’ll love them,” the florist assured.

“Sometimes it is the gesture that counts, rather than how grandiose it is,” Yusuke said.

Ryuji was more worried about them getting crushed on the train, but squashed the thought down, wondering instead what he was going to do with a bouquet of flowers while they had their talk.

Yusuke sighed again as he stared at the flowers in his hands. “We can get takeout, if you’re still insistent on having food,” he said, “and then we’ll go back to your place and put those flowers in a proper vase. You do have one, correct?”

Did they? He thought he remembered his ma having one somewhere, but he hadn’t seen it around recently. “Well, we got cups. What’s the problem, as long as she recognizes the gesture?”

Yusuke didn’t answer except to sigh, again, and click his tongue in thinly-veiled annoyance. The sound stopped Ryuji in his tracks.

“Look, Yusuke,” he said, plastic bouquet wrapping crinkling in his hand, “we don’t gotta do this today. I just—when ya didn’t answer your phone, at all, I got worried, okay?”

And more than a little pissed that nobody seemed to be around anymore, except Futaba, and she was usually devouring more anime than was healthy or nose-deep into her robotics textbook. He didn’t even know where she got the thing, just that she had it. He didn’t even know she was interested in robots.

“I can understand your worry, but you didn’t need to seek me out at my own workplace, did you?”

“I guess not, but what else could I have done?”

“You could have talked to Ann.”

“She’s the one who told me, and she said she’s not gonna say anything else. Not until I ask you about it.”

Now Yusuke turned his way, curiosity glinting in his eyes. There. Fucking finally. “Ask me what?”

His stomach grumbled. Yusuke placed a hand over it, suddenly very deep in thought. Ryuji didn’t like that look. “Yusuke, when was the last time you ate?”

“This morning,” he said. “Nakanohara made breakfast. I have been eating properly, despite everything, although I may have skipped lunch today to finish up some schoolwork.”

“So, you skipped lunch.”

Yusuke nodded. Ryuji sighed. “Okay. We’ll—we’ll get takeout, and then see if there’s a vase at my place I can put these in, like you said. Okay?”

Yusuke only nodded again. Ryuji led him to the station, phone pressed to an ear as he ordered a pizza that he hoped would get to his place almost as soon as they did. There would even be leftovers for his ma—he’d be sure to put some aside for her before the two of them dug into what was left.

So when they finally got there, dug a small vase out of the cabinets for the flowers, and were chowing down on pizza, Ryuji realized he had no idea how to bring up the subject. ‘Ann told me you have a crush on Yuuki’ just seemed too blunt. Yusuke could and would easily dodge the question.

It was Yusuke who asked first. “Did you ask out Ann?”

“No,” Ryuji said. He didn’t feel as ashamed about it as before, just resigned to the thought that there would always be other guys in Ann’s life who would do her better as her boyfriend. “We talked about what Yuuki left out of his story, and I told her I took his phone. Forced it off him, like some effing thug, you know the story. Even if I had asked her, after that, why would she say yes?”

“Because you’re a genuinely kind person who cares about others,” Yusuke replied.

Ryuji rolled his eyes. Genuinely kind, uh-huh, sure. He ignored the comment and went on: “She started telling me that me and Yuuki should sit down and talk it over again, and I’m gonna do that. Maybe tomorrow. He’s usually free then. But we started talking about Shiho, and what it meant to be friends or lovers or whatever, and I kind of mentioned that Yuuki and Akira were dating. Are dating. Are they still dating, if they can’t talk to each other?”

“I’m not sure,” Yusuke said, around a mouthful of crust. He swallowed. “There have been times in history where a relationship that is parted by distance still continues as strong as the day one left the other, but these days such things are doomed the moment two people separate. In—in Akira’s case, I don’t believe he could give that love up so easily.”

“And Yuuki? You think he would, if he got the chance?”

Yusuke had a serious pokerface when it counted. He barely batted an eye as he said, “I don’t believe so, no. He was very devoted. It would be a hard link for anyone to break.”

It was the rings, Ryuji thought. The rings gave him a little bit of hope that everything would turn out for the better, that Akira would eventually return home and the two of them could finally be together. It was obvious to anyone with eyes and enough sense to use them that Yuuki had it bad—and for a guy he’d never even met in person.

It felt like a disaster waiting to happen.

“Anyway,” Ryuji said, “I mentioned they were dating, and she got all surprised. You wanna know why, Yusuke?”

“Why?” asked Yusuke.

“‘Cause she said you must be going through something. She asked me if you talked to me about it, then said that she thought it was surprising that they were dating at all. That Yuuki was dating _Akira_.”

Yusuke didn’t say a thing to that, even though Ryuji paused to eat some more. Maybe he was the type to clam up under pressure. He was even starting to look pale, and Ryuji felt a little bad about that, but what could he do, after the stunt Yusuke had pulled in Yongenjaya’s alley about Ann?

Ryuji wasn’t about to do the same. Yuuki was his best friend. He wasn’t going to ruin that by fake-dating the guy, even if it was to make Yusuke jealous, which would be pretty fucking stupid in the first place.

“How,” Yusuke eventually breathed, after what felt like an eternity.

“I guess at the party? That’s the only time we’ve all been together recently. She can’t have remembered from, what, two years ago? Did you even like him back then?”

“No,” Yusuke said, still sounding like he’d been knocked flat, like all the air had escaped his lungs. “Not—not back then. By the time I realized it, it was too late. He had Akira.”

“So, when I asked ya what your type was, ya lied to me.”

“I didn’t know,” Yusuke insisted. “Not back then. You must understand, I—I didn’t know what I wanted back then. A roof over my head, food on the table, sketchbooks and pencils—that was all I was ever taught to want. But—friends? Lovers? Even well-meaning classmates who critiqued my works? Madarame always said that other people would be a distraction from my work, or that they would attempt to ruin me out of jealousy, but I—even if I wanted to, there was nothing to be proud of except what he gave me. My title of his apprentice.”

Ryuji chewed and dragged his salad bowl closer.

“I didn’t think I was worthy of having someone who loved me,” Yusuke said, thoroughly on a roll by now. “I had nothing, I was nothing; by the time I realized that maybe I, too, was worthy of it—no, by the time I realized that I, too, wanted love as other people had it, it was too late. By then you had already asked me what my type was, and I gave you an artist’s answer, because that was all I had.”

“Oh,” Ryuji said, toying with a cherry tomato.

“Just ‘oh,’ Ryuji?”

“Well, I mean—Ann was right. You really are upset about it, even if you don’t show it.”

“What would be the point of showing everyone how upset I am that Yuuki is taken? I have friends now, and I refuse to divide them over such a trivial matter. I’ve managed to hide it from him and the rest of you, for at least this long, haven’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” Ryuji agreed.

“And none of our friendships have suffered for it, have they?”

“Nah,” Ryuji agreed.

“Good,” Yusuke said, and tucked back into his pizza. He was putting piles of lettuce on top and pulling faces as he ate.

“Dude, if it’s gross, don’t do that,” Ryuji laughed.

“I only wanted to try it,” Yusuke defended.

“And you did, so stop it. Anyway—do you, I dunno, feel a little better? I’m not gonna push ya to confess, either, ‘cause you would’ve already done that by now if you meant to, right?”

“I suppose I do feel a trite lighter,” Yusuke said, flicking half-eaten lettuce leaves back into his bowl. “But between schoolwork, and my job, and Nakanohara and Akira, well, I have very little free time nowadays. That much was true as well.”

“What’s going on with Nakanohara and Akira?”

Yusuke stiffened, then said, “I’ve challenged Nakanohara to a contest. He has to finish one painting that his ex-girlfriend would like regardless of who painted it before I finish three.”

“Why’s he painting for his ex-girlfriend?”

“Because I’m hoping the work will distract him enough that he will stop stalking her,” Yusuke said. “So far he’s asked me to accompany him on several of his outings where we spy on her from afar. He gets ten minutes or until she notices, and then we leave. So far, I fear, it has not been working.”

“No shit,” Ryuji said. “And Akira?”

“Yuuki showed me his website before it was finished, and I’ve been keeping abreast of the goings-on there,” Yusuke said. He pulled another face. “The things they are willing to do for fun, or because they can, are quite appalling. It’s as if they don’t recognize the gravity of the situation, and the ones suffering for it are Akira and Yuuki.”

“I think ‘taba mentioned that,” Ryuji said. “Something about how his security was full of holes, and that she was gonna beef it up. Make it so that not even a worm could crawl in, or something like that.”

“Is it—can I be jealous, that he made an entire website for the sole purpose of bringing Akira home?”

Ryuji thought of Ann, and how she probably had admirers across all of Japan and half of the US. He didn’t like the thought of anyone else becoming her boyfriend—how would he feel, if she were dating a guy who went missing and she poured all of her time and energy into getting him back? “Yeah, of course you can,” he said.

“You should tell her soon,” Yusuke said. “I would not wish this feeling on anyone else, Ryuji. It’s, well. It’s awful. I never realized I was capable of feeling like this until now, and now that I am, I wish I couldn’t. I wish I weren’t. Do you understand?”

“Don’t constantly think of what I might’ve had if I had the courage to tell her, you mean. Don’t regret it,” Ryuji guessed, and Yusuke nodded.

He wanted to go back to her with news that he was trying to make everything—not _right_ , but better. Untangling all the thoughts that had him so twisted inside, all the thoughts that were making him think he wasn’t good enough.

“I think I’m gonna have to talk to Yuuki before I tell her,” Ryuji said. “There’s just something we gotta hash out, or it’s gonna bug me for the rest of my life. And I want to tell her that I’m trying to be better about this kind of shit. Give her something to be proud of.”

“Isn’t she already proud of you?”

“She didn’t say so.” Ryuji looked down at his plate, the crumbs and grease and a bit of lettuce that he’d dropped. Ann had eaten three slices of cake at a cake buffet when he thought she’d gorge herself; maybe the sweets at the party had helped kill most of her cravings, but maybe something had happened while she was abroad. She was trying to be a better model.

He needed to match that passion. That was what it felt like.

“I’m sure she is,” Yusuke said. “I am. Yuuki is. You’re farther along now than even you thought you would be; how could we not be proud of you?”

“Beats me,” Ryuji said. “But thanks, man. I’m—I’m proud of you, too. For telling me all this.”

“You’ve been more understanding than I thought,” Yusuke admitted. “I was sure if you ever found out, you’d be angry that I lied to you, even if I didn’t mean to. I wanted to say something, but I wasn’t ever sure how to phrase it. How does one admit to their friend that they’ve a crush on another in the first place?”

“Isn’t that why it’s so hard? All this love junk, I mean. Life would be easier if there were, I dunno, neon signs to tell us that shit.”

“Neon signs to tell us how we feel?”

“Yeah,” Ryuji said. “But it’s a stupid idea. If my ma knew she was marrying an abusive drunk, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

“Most likely I wouldn’t, either,” Yusuke said. Then he glanced at the clock and sighed. “It’s getting late. I should head back soon, and make sure Nakanohara is keeping to his promise to stay home today.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ryuji said. “I’ll get the dishes. You head on home.”

He thought when Yusuke left the apartment would feel emptier, lonelier. It didn’t; he did the dishes and swept the floor and double-checked for his ma’s portion of dinner in the fridge and the text he’d sent telling her it was there and felt less alone than he had in a while.

Maybe all this heart-to-heart junk was messing with his head.

Maybe it didn’t matter. He felt too good for it to matter.

All he had to do was persevere.

* * *

Yuuki knew he was in trouble when Ryuji called him out of the blue on a night when he was considering heading to bed early. Nothing good ever came of out-of-the-blue phone calls that started with, “Hey, can we talk?”

“Sure,” he said, staring at his most recent essay. A lower grade than he usually got, and half the pages were marked up. He knew it wasn’t his best work, but he’d had no idea it was this bad. “What’s up?”

“So, uh,” Ryuji said, then laughed a bit. “Shit, man. I dunno how to say it.”

“So just say it.” _Please_ , Yuuki wanted to beg. _Be straight with me. Not like Yamada, who keeps throwing looks my way in class. Please._

“Uh,” a huff of breath, “okay, then. So, you remember how we talked about how I took your phone, and we pretty much agreed not to talk about it again?”

“It doesn’t bother me anymore, if you’re still hung up on that.”

“Nah, not that. Not the taking-your-phone part, anyway.”

“Then what?”

Another huff of breath. Yuuki heard noises that could have been Ryuji trying and failing to start a sentence.

“If it’s about the drink I gave you, I didn’t know what it tasted like,” Yuuki said.

“No, the drink was fine. It was just—you know, when I was asking you for your passcode, and had you pinned on the floor, and all that.”

Oh, that. The things Yuuki had called him to get him to give up and leave. Yuuki remembered calling him coach, and comparing him to Kamoshida. He winced. “You should know I didn’t mean to say that stuff. I thought if I did you’d get pissed, beat me up a bit, and then leave. Without my phone. And I already told you he never tried that stuff on the boys.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Ryuji said. “But if he never did it to the guys, why would you think it’d work on me?”

“Because you’d get disgusted, beat me up a bit, and then leave,” Yuuki repeated. “Without my phone. Do we have to talk about this?”

“Uh, yeah. We do. Yuuki, dude, you—” he lowered his voice, “—you tried grinding on me. What was that about?”

“I just told you.” And he hated remembering it, too. The way Ryuji had looked at him after, a weird mixture of anger and pity, almost like he was staring at a bug he’d squashed with his shoe. “I was hoping that if you got mad enough, you’d forget why you were there and leave.”

“So you thought to do _that_?”

“What else could I have done?”

“I don’t know! Not that!”

“Then why are we talking about it?”

“Because it bugs me, that’s why,” Ryuji said, trying to keep from shouting again. Maybe his mom was home. “And because I can’t let it go unless you tell me why you did it.”

“I just _told_ you,” Yuuki reminded him. “And—and it was the only part of you I could reach, okay? You had my hands pinned, and I don’t have your leg strength, so that was off the table! I’m _sorry_!”

Another huff. Yuuki tried not to think that it was probably the closest thing to any action that Ryuji would have gotten, ever, and he’d gotten it from a guy he was stealing from. “Okay,” Ryuji said after a while. “So, if I hadn’t backed off. If ‘taba hadn’t called me. If I’d been the effing scumbag you were calling me—what then, Yuuki? What would you have done?”

“I-if you—what?”

“Do I gotta spell it out for you?”

If Ryuji hadn’t looked at him with pity in his eyes, he meant. If Ryuji had, instead, decided he didn’t care who or what or how he got his first time with. Hirotaka really liked sending him articles about that. “No,” Yuuki said. “You don’t.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said.

“You know why I’m asking, right?”

“No.”

“Because—let’s say it wasn’t me, that it was somebody else who didn’t care. Japan’s got shit laws on that shit, Yuuki. He’d say you started it. He’d say you wanted it.”

“I know what the laws are,” Yuuki said. “My dad sends me emails about them. He wants me to be safe.”

“And I do, too,” Ryuji said. “And I—I don’t wanna be the guy who’s gotta remember his best friend doing that stuff to him. I know why you did it, but…”

“But it bothers you that I did,” Yuuki finished.

“Yeah, it does.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ryuji went quiet for so long Yuuki thought he’d hung up, but the timer on the call was still running. He tried saying it again, then again, because nothing he did would ever make that single instance ever go away. Nothing they did would ever make that day—that week—go away.

They had to move past it.

“I’m sorry, too,” Ryuji finally said. “For making you feel like you gotta apologize for that. For doing it that way in the first place.”

“You were worried about Akira and Goro,” Yuuki said.

“That don’t excuse it,” Ryuji said.

“I guess not,” Yuuki said.

“Just—you’ll be careful from now on, right?”

“I’m not going to gay bars, Ryuji,” Yuuki said, because everything his dad was digging up tended to happen there, or at love hotels, or anywhere in the vicinity of Shinjuku. That didn’t mean it wasn’t happening anywhere else, but Yuuki was too plain to bother with, right?

(Yamada. Dimples, and the eye mole. Maybe he wasn’t as plain as he thought—)

“Still, dude,” Ryuji said. “Maybe—maybe hit the gym with me again? Guys can’t bug ya too much if you’re jacked, right?”

“I never hit the gym with you. We went running a couple times,” Yuuki reminded him. Working out again sounded nice, though. Maybe without asses like Kamoshida around Yuuki could learn to appreciate it. “But—sure. Although I’m not sure if I can afford a membership.”

He could hear Ryuji’s grin through the phone. “I know a good place for that, then. How ‘bout tomorrow? You free then?”

Yuuki thought of his morning classes. He could afford to skip one or two, and he wouldn’t have to notice Yamada staring at him when he thought Yuuki wasn’t looking. The only thing he wouldn’t be able to skip was the lab later in the day. “I’ve got classes, but I’m not really feeling it,” he said. “So, sure. Tomorrow.”

They made plans to meet up at Shibuya Station, and Ryuji instructed him to bring a change of clothes for after, and not just his old Shujin jersey. Yuuki wondered if he even had workout clothes anymore, if he’d tossed them all out while his dad was helping him move or if they were buried somewhere in the pile in his closet.

He stared back at the table and his essay. Cleaning the closet sounding like a lot less work than figuring out how, and where, he’d gone wrong in this one. He could also just worry over it on the train.

Plus, his ratty sneakers probably weren’t going to cut it if Ryuji wanted to run. He had a better pair in that closet, somewhere, the ones he used to wear when he went running to try and escape all of his problems—not that the solution ever worked—and they were still good, if a little dirty.

He sighed, got up, and threw the door open, prepared to search.

* * *

When Yusuke returned home after another day spent at the florist’s—Miss Hanasaki’s questions of “How did your talk with your friend go, Kitagawa?” and “Are you feeling any better?” still ringing in his ears—and was startled to find Nakanohara nowhere in sight, the dining table empty.

Nakanohara had yet to skip his share of the cooking, and yet there Yusuke was, staring into a nearly-empty fridge at eight in the evening, with nothing prepared inside.

On the one hand, this was good. It meant that Nakanohara was taking his bet seriously, and was rushing forward, so intent on his goal that everything else disappeared.

On the other, this was bad. Was he eating properly, or was he just snacking to stem the burn of hunger in order to paint? Did he never intend to go grocery shopping until he was done? Was he focusing properly at work?

Yusuke couldn’t be sure, but Nakanohara’s door wasn’t locked. He knocked, waited for Nakanohara to respond, and then pushed the door open when he didn’t. “Nakanohara,” he said, ignoring the mess.

His guardian jumped. A pile of papers haphazardly stacked at his elbow slid to the floor. Pencil shavings surrounded his feet, and balls of more paper spilled over the top of the wastebasket. His cuffs were smudged with graphite. “Yes?” he asked.

This felt oddly familiar. “Have you eaten?”

Nakanohara blinked in the way of a man coming out of a trance. “I… don’t think I have, no.”

“Were you working?”

“Yes,” he said. “You see, I remembered that Kayo mentioned she likes black-eyed susans, and I was trying to think of a way to draw it in a way she’d like.”

“That’s good,” Yusuke said, “but it’s quite late, and we should both eat.”

Nakanohara blinked again. “I don’t believe I went shopping.”

“We can go now.”

“No, no,” Nakanohara said, shaking his head and staring down at his hands, the papers, the worn nub of another pencil. “It—it was my turn to cook today. I’ll go now, and get dinner started. Do your homework, and, ah, take a bath. Relax a bit. You’ve seemed very stressed recently.”

Take a bath and relax. As if Yusuke could without tracing Akira’s lines of scars across his own skin, wondering what it would be like to always be burdened with such reminders of the atrocities he had been forced to go through.

But still, if even Nakanohara in his bursts of inspiration had seen it, maybe that was what he needed. Time to himself without thinking about painting or flowers or schoolwork or Akira.

(To think he had almost given himself away. He needed better control of himself.)

“Perhaps I will,” he said, as Nakanohara stood up and worked the kinks out of his back.

But when Nakanohara was gone, he didn’t. He went to his room and stared at the paintings instead. Yuuki’s was turning out wonderfully, and Yusuke went through the motions of touching up spots where the paint had dried a shade too light. Akira’s was still only a sketch in his sketchbook, a note laid out on paper. He had dozens of them, and none were good enough to showcase what he wanted them to.

Perhaps, if he had an idea, it would be better, easier—but he didn’t. Akira was as far away from his understanding as a fish swimming deep in the sea, and Yusuke could only catch glimpses of its scales and Akira’s pain from afar.

 _“_ _I’ll be alright as long as you’re here,”_ Akira had said once, but Yusuke knew it for a lie the moment he said it. He knew it for a lie the moment Akira had cried out for Yuuki when his precious robot was destroyed; Yusuke, fearing Akira’s tear-stained, angry face, had yet to check the app again.

He should, and he knew it. Akira could not simply be left waiting like this; Yuske feared that with each passing day Akira’s subconscious would reject him further until the app wasn’t there anymore. How could he help Akira then? How could he help Yuuki?

How would he be able to face Yuuki?

The answer was simple: he wouldn’t. It was already hard to, with the knowledge of both the app on his phone and of his love, and Yusuke wouldn’t be able to face him and say that he had every chance to make things right but ultimately couldn’t.

(And Yusuke was… more than a little afraid of the other one, that Delta boy, the real, live human being Yusuke controlled on the other channel. It wasn’t a shock to learn that Yusuke was influencing his actions—but outright control, down to the words he would speak on rare occasions?

That was too far. He deserved every slander the Ra Cielan could think of and then some. He deserved to be thought of as nothing more than some evil god who brought agony upon those who didn’t do as he wished; he deserved to be nothing more than another Madarame to innocent artists hoping to nurture their talent and instead finding it bound hand and feet to do his bidding.

 _“_ _Give my body back to me,”_ that boy had ground out, through pain Yusuke had caused.

 **I’ve got to bring them home** , was the only reason he was allowed to give, **so it belongs to me.**

Dispassionate. Disinterested. Exactly what Madarame had sounded like, towards the end when works were due and Yusuke was forced to sacrifice sleep and food and basic hygiene to meet his demands because no one else was there to fill them.

“I don’t care how you do it, Yusuke, it needs to be done,” Madarame would say even as Yusuke’s head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton and he was one strong breeze away from snapping in half.

Yusuke was taking everything from that boy, the same way Madarame had stolen from all of his pupils, and the thought wormed itself into his head: he was no better than Madarame; in the end he was just another Madarame; he was destined to do no more than to take, and lie, and steal to get what he wanted.

Even lives. Even bodies.

That particular thought had shaken him so hard that the paint can he had been carrying fell straight to the floor; Kamei had been startled so badly by the noise that she had banged her head on a nearby shelf, causing the bookend and several books to slide off.

The mess had taken hours to clean up. Kamei, at least, didn’t blame him for it.)

He sat at his easel and tapped on the app. Nakanohara would be awhile doing the shopping, and Yusuke could get a little farther—provided he had a way to, after all. The robot was destroyed, and the other man he’d been controlling had rejected him. Yusuke didn’t blame him.

He only wished it came at a better time.

 _“_ _Finally!”_ Morgana snarled from his phone. _“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting? Geez, it feels like years!”_

 **Morgana** , he picked.

_“_ _Don’t ‘Morgana’ me, mister! Don’t even try it! Do you. Have any idea. How long. I’ve. Been. Waiting?!”_

Yusuke had met several cats in his time at Kosei that had much better temperaments than the cat-boy glaring at him. Maybe the teachers had only let the good ones who didn’t misbehave in for sketching practice. **I don’t know.**

 _“_ _I don’t know either!”_ Morgana cried, throwing his hands up and huffing. _“Why are you broken into so many pieces you wouldn’t even sell for decent scrap metal? Why are you here? Why am_ I _here?”_

In Akira’s dream world, he meant. The place the virus had created to lock Akira’s mind in, so that his body was useful for no more than creating mindless Sharl puppets as it sang for years. Morgana, guardian of that piece of Akira’s soulscape, should have lost his purpose for being the very second Akira forced his way out of it.

And yet, there they were. Moai heads sprouting from the ground like grotesque trees; vacuum tubes like malformed bushes, some of them flickering to life while others died. Yusuke remembered the scenery because it was so odd; surely nowhere else would he be able to find a capsule machine larger than himself poking out of the dirt sideways and threatening to crush his robot’s mind-self.

 _“_ _Well, whatever,”_ Morgana said, losing interest in his one-sided argument. _“Doesn’t matter, I guess. But if you’re here, that means you’re staying here for awhile, and my shop isn’t open to freeloaders, got it? Go find your own place to sleep. Shoo!”_

**I don’t need sleep.**

_“_ _You know what I meant! Get going, go on! You’re—you’re obstructing my business!”_

It was a strange thing to say, when Morgana had only ever had one customer—and that customer was gone, now, and not likely to return—but he stormed back into his shop and slammed the door shut. Yusuke could hear the click of locks being thrown on the other side.

Well, considering how things had gone the last time they met, Yusuke didn’t blame him the caution. Instead he turned around and headed down the path—lined with extension cords, their sockets plugged into each other to form a little fence, even if every arch wasn’t perfect—and eyed the remains of Akira’s house, the few brick walls still standing blackened with soot. Part of the attic floor still remained, the wooden boards sagging over the rest of the house, but it would do as a roof until Yusuke figured out what was going on and whether it was safe for him to leave—or if he even had a body, robotic or not, to return to.

He headed for it, already planning out how he could form a decent shelter out of the house, when Akira rose into view, brushing his hands on his shorts.

He must have heard the robot coming, as he flinched and then finally turned. _“Is it you?”_ he asked, and aside from the destroyed house around them it could have been a repeat of the way they first met.

(Akira, hope swimming in his eyes through flashes of fear and resignation: _“Is it you? Are you back?”_

Yusuke was given no other option than to say **No.** )

 **Did I worry you?** he chose this time.

 _“_ _Well, a bit,”_ Akira said. _“That was—well, that was really stupid of you, to jump in front of a laser to protect me. If you were alive over here—if you weren’t a robot—you’d be dead, you know.”_

He paused for a moment, letting it sink in. It was entirely unneeded; Yusuke knew his one and only job was to protect Akira, proceed through events as they unfolded, and bring Akira home.

Akira ducked his head, one grimy, dust-gray hand reaching for his fringe and tugging. _“But, uh, thanks. For doing it anyway, because if you didn’t, I’d be dead instead. And—and everyone’s_ _been_ _working hard to rebuild you, too, so you’ve got a body to go back to. They made me stop working on it on my own and told me to relax, but how can I, when there’s still so much to do?”_

What he meant was that he couldn’t move forward without the robot’s protection. Metal and wiring were easier to replace and fix than flesh and blood, and no doubt all of Akira’s memories of Yuuki resided inside the robot. Akira had no choice but to fix it, and Yusuke knew from Yuuki’s rants that Akira would forgo sleep and food to get a pressing job done, even if there was no true rush.

 _“_ _Um, anyway,”_ Akira said, once he realized he was toying with his hair again and dropped his hand. _“When I came here to find you they were done, so you can come back anytime you want.”_

He stole glances behind the robot as he talked, as if hoping someone else was creeping up behind them. Morgana, most likely, since there was no one else for them to meet inside this little pocket soulscape.

**Let’s go visit Morgana.**

_“_ _What?”_ Akira startled. _“No, no, we don’t have to do that. Your new body’s waiting for you, and besides—if he tries to stop us again—I mean, I don’t want to fight him again. Not when we used to get along so well.”_

He paused. Yusuke took the moment to pick **You need to talk.**

_“_ _Do you really think so? No, if you say so, it must be true. I don’t want him to hate me forever, after all…”_

He still wasn’t sure, and Yusuke could tell. He turned the robot around and walked it out of Akira’s ruined house, back to the path he’d taken to get there. Akira could either stay and refuse to see Morgana or follow along and try to reconcile.

Yusuke was getting rather tired of being the one handing out ultimatums.

But at last he heard footsteps racing to catch up with him. Akira made no comment on his decision or on Yusuke’s sudden abandonment, and the short, quiet walk suited Yusuke just fine.

It was a shame it was shattered when they neared Morgana’s shop again. The cat-boy was out polishing his capsule machines, but ditched his rag and polisher to dart back inside his shop. _“Go away!”_ he snarled, muffled through the door. Yusuke itched to tear it down.

 _“_ _Morgana,”_ Akira said, at a loss.

_“_ _If you want something, just try out a machine and get lost!”_

_“_ _I’m sorry,”_ Akira said. _“I’m not here for your machines; I’m here to talk to you. I’m—I’m really sorry, Morgana. But you have to understand why I wanted to leave.”_

 _“_ _I know why you wanted to leave,”_ Morgana said. _“That doesn’t mean you had to leave me here, not knowing whether I’d die or not. If you didn’t have the virus, you wouldn’t need me anymore.”_

 _“_ _You mean if you didn’t have me, the virus wouldn’t need_ you _anymore,”_ Akira argued. _“The only reason you were there was to keep me from trying to leave, so I’d sleep forever and make more of those Sharls. But you gave me the blueprints for the—the robot, so you had to have known, had to have guessed—”_

_“_ _If I didn’t, you would have gotten bored and wandered around and I couldn’t have that, okay? I did it because I needed you to stick around. I didn’t expect the stupid robot to move.”_

If Yusuke had to guess, that meant Morgana had known, somehow, that there was only one person helping Akira before. One lone, sole person working almost entirely on his own. Morgana had laid out a teasing trail of breadcrumbs for Yuuki and Akira to follow, all in the name of prolonging Akira’s unnatural sleep. Morgana had pushed Yuuki and Akira together with teasing remarks aimed at Yuuki and fun date cards Akira would love.

“Oh,” he said, as it all clicked. Morgana wasn’t sulking because Akira had left him trapped here—had left him, period—he was sulking because Yuuki had given Akira the chance to do so. Yuuki made Akira cut the connection, despite how badly it hurt them both, and because of that Akira had left.

Morgana had tried to turn them into two people who couldn’t bare to lose the other, and had only partially succeeded. He hadn’t taken into account how deeply the two needed each other, like a physical ache in a phantom limb. Naturally they would do anything to return to the other’s side—including spurning long-time, well-meaning guardians that had let one cry on his very small shoulder.

But Akira, after a long moment of silence, laughed. _“And yet I still came back to you, didn’t I?”_

Morgana grumbled something inaudible through the door. Gradually the locks were undone, and he peeked one bright blue eye out of the crack. _“Because you readministered the virus to yourself, you moron. Did you have to do something so stupid just to get your robot back?”_

 _“_ _Of course I did,”_ Akira said. _“A lower dosage of the virus, and this place is back—and so are you, and so is he.”_

 _“_ _Hmph,”_ Morgana grunted. _“Do you even know why that is, Lighthouse Keeper?”_

Akira turned to look at the robot—at Yusuke, through the screen—and asked, _“Why he’s back, you mean?”_

 _“_ _Honestly, sometimes, I swear,”_ Morgana grumbled to himself, then shoved the door open and stepped outside. His bandanna was askew, with a spot of polisher on the edge. _“Be honest for a moment, Keeper. Is he_ really _the one you wanted to be here?_ _And don’t lie. We all know what you said before the laser struck._ _”_

_“_ _I’m not answering that.”_

_“_ _Fine, then,”_ Morgana said, turning instead to Yusuke. Yusuke was dimly aware of the apartment door opening, of the rustle of bags as Nakanohara maneuvered them into the kitchen. Hopefully cooking would occupy him for a while. _“You, then, Mr. Robot. Maybe you can tell me something instead; instead of accepting that your body was broken and that you had fulfilled your duty, why did you come back?”_

 **Because I had to.** Akira wasn’t yet home, and Yuuki would never be happy until he was, and Yusuke was determined to see it through.

 _“_ _You had to,”_ Akira repeated, tugging again at his hair.

 _“_ _The Lighthouse Keeper here didn’t drag you back to him, you know,”_ Morgana went on. _“You chose to come back. You chose to learn what happens next and to see him through it. No matter how you look at it, that’s a very deep bond you’ve managed to forge.”_

 _“_ _A deep…”_ Akira repeated again, tugging even harder at his hair.

_“_ _So you’d better see it through, understand? I won’t accept anything less than perfection, got it?”_

**I do.**

A deep shudder went through Akira. He ignored the clump of hair that he’d pulled out of his head in favor of staring at the ground, expression shadowed.

 _“_ _Good!”_ Morgana purred with satisfaction. _“Now, with all that mushy stuff out of the way—get going! You’ve got a brand spanking new body to get back to, don’t you? I bet it’s cool!”_

Akira made no comment, even as Morgana took him by the arm and hauled him back to the crack in the wall and the sheer cliff on the other side; Yusuke followed behind, wishing there was something he could say or do to make this easier. It had to be difficult, learning that someone other than the one Akira loved so much was willing to help him. It had to be difficult to accept it, and it had to be difficult to have no part in the finishing touches of a work Akira had clearly been pouring his soul into.

Yusuke thought of those paintings of his that had gone missing overnight, only to later show up in one of Madarame’s galleries with a splash of gray paint fanning out from the middle, or with a swath of blue or red blotting out a person or an animal or empty white space, and understood.

And as he and Akira stood on the edge of that cliff, with fog swirling about the air obscuring the bottom, he thought he understood that, too. The first time he and Akira stood here Yusuke had thought it seemed very final, throwing themselves off this cliff in order to wake Akira up. He didn’t think he would ever find himself back here, staring into the abyss once more.

In the moment before the fall, he wondered how many people desired that finality. Yuuki and Suzui had, certainly, and it seemed every other week there was news of someone throwing themselves off a bridge or a building or in front of a train to keep themselves from thinking anymore.

He wondered how many people would go through with it if they knew that the true freedom they desired was unattainable. If karma was to be believed, they would only return even worse for the wear than before, and they had no one to blame but themselves.

The robot turned in midair. Yusuke saw Morgana, small and growing ever smaller, leaning over the edge of the cliff. He watched them go, his face sadder than Yusuke had ever seen it.

Even viruses felt, it seemed.

And then the screen dissolved into static that meshed rather well with the sound of sizzling oil from the kitchen. Yusuke couldn’t hear Nakanohara humming through the door and over the noise, but he likely was. He had to be.

Yusuke endured another moment or two or crashing static before the screen lit up again; his new body rested upright inside of a tube, the gentle light of a barrier casting the faces of Akira’s friends and allies into a ghostly blue. He could see the Sharl boy grinning, and the cat-eared girl giving orders for final tests. Akira’s former rival in the Imperial Succession retreated down the stairs of the Star Singer’s Tower to fetch him just as the barrier came down and Yusuke took his first steps in his new body.

The new robot was sleek, its movement smoother than the last’s clunkier, halting steps. It shone in tones of silver and steel instead of brass and gold, and Yusuke was glad to note that it no longer had the same jarring contrast to the stars and space surrounding them. It looked like it belonged at last.

Akira appeared, being led up the steps by his former rival. He was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, and part of his hair was still squashed flat, but he still offered a small smile at the sight of the robot standing tall atop the tower.

Yusuke noted the determination sparking fires in his eyes and knew that smile wasn’t relief at seeing him there, alive and well—or as alive and well as a robot could be—but one of determination. Drive, Ryuji would call it, as he tended to grin like a maniac before taking on any kind of challenge.

Yusuke needed to match that drive, that determination to see everything through to its end. It was what Akira and Yuuki deserved, and by now Yusuke knew he was the only one with enough willpower to achieve it. Everyone else was falling for ploys and traps and the simple curiosity of _what would happen if_ —and Yusuke was learning from their mistakes. He had to learn from their mistakes, because once he failed, he wouldn’t get another chance.

Akira wouldn’t let him.

* * *

“Sojiro,” Wakaba said, from the kitchen entrance. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Hm?” he grunted, concentrating more on the ledgers in front of him. Futaba liked her digital accounts of Leblanc’s finances, and her numbers were never wrong, but he liked having hard copies around. Liked seeing the pages spread out in front of him and the smell of ink from his pen.

“Sojiro, please.”

He sighed. Put his pen down, rubbed at eyes that were tired from squinting down at words and numbers. Maybe he needed reading glasses.

God, he must really be getting old.

“Sure,” he said, motioning to the other chair. He let her sit and set a small stack of papers on top of his own. He thought he recognized the top sheet but couldn’t place it before Wakaba covered it up with her arms, then her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, kowtowing over his kitchen table.

“For what, exactly?”

“I looked back through my call logs, and my emails,” she said. “All of them. You were trying to tell me the whole time that she needed me here, and I—I was too absorbed in my own research to see that. I was too afraid of putting her in danger to come home, too afraid of having everything I’ve worked for go to waste or fall into the wrong hands if I died—and I let Futaba suffer for it.”

Wakaba sniffled a bit, holding back tears that would smudge the ink on her papers. “I—I even got in touch with her therapist. He didn’t tell me anything other than that Futaba’s brain makes her see or hear things that aren’t real, and that I need to be supportive and care for her if she starts going through an episode. Apparently it can happen even if she’s on her medication, if the dose is too low. He sounded surprised to hear from me, Sojiro. He sounded surprised I existed at all.”

Sojiro nodded. He made it no secret that Futaba was his charge, not his daughter, to anyone it mattered to. The hospital, the rehab center, the therapist—they all knew, all had to know that he was only there to watch out for her. It was practically his job, aside from running the cafe.

“And, well, what he said made me think,” Wakaba went on, “that if I hadn’t left and if you weren’t watching over her these past few years, Futaba might not have made it. You were right, and you never said it, but I was a horrible mother. I still am, thinking of my job and how my colleagues might view me instead of what Futaba’s trying to tell me. If you weren’t her guardian, she wouldn’t even be here to tell me these things. I wouldn’t have to worry about what she says, because she wouldn’t be around to say anything.

“I could barely cook. I could barely clean. Our apartment was always a mess. Futaba tried to keep it tidy but I’d snap at her sometimes for moving my paperwork or my notes or my shopping lists. She always put them in the same spots, but I couldn’t stand it when she moved them. She was only trying to help, and I never encouraged it. Never appreciated that she tried to do the laundry on her own, or that she wanted ingredients to cook something she learned at school. I never taught her to do any of that; I never taught her a thing.”

That was probably true, too. Futaba’s photographic memory meant she could recall anything she saw with the briefest of glances; all she would have had to do was watch others do it and copy what they did, even if the result wasn’t perfect.

“But you, Sojiro, you did. You took her in and helped her when she needed it. You listen to what she says and you defend what she has to say. You’re teaching her to cook, she’s eating salads at dinner, she has friends—she could never be this happy with me.”

“You forget how happy she was throwing you that party,” he reminded her. “She’s happy having you back in Japan with her. She’s happy you’re around.”

“Because I wasn’t around before,” Wakaba said. “I was never around. She’d beg me for homecooked meals or trips to restaurants and I always put my work first, Sojiro. She may be happy to have me here, but I’m just an addition now. You’re the one making her happy. She would be miserable without you here.”

“Wakaba—”

“It’s true,” she insisted. “If I paid her half as much attention as you do, maybe I’d think so, too, but it’s _true_ , Sojiro. You’re the one doing everything you can for her. I’m not, and I haven’t for a long time. Not since she was still small enough that I could hold her in my arms, and not even that lasted very long, did it?”

“No,” he said. Back when Wakaba first had Futaba, after her maternity leave she would bring Futaba to work. Futaba’s carrier had sat on an empty desk for the men to avoid and the women to coo over; Wakaba had tried, back then, to be a good mom. She pureed all of Futaba’s food herself. She bought fresh produce and made healthy meals for a toddling Futaba. At the lab, there hadn’t been a day when Futaba didn’t have someone watching her on their breaks, and Wakaba had always gone home on time.

They’d been happy, back then, before Wakaba’s team had hit that breakthrough. Everything had changed after that, Wakaba especially.

Maybe what he’d loved back then was the beaming, proud young mom as her daughter started reading picture books at the age of two. Maybe what he’d loved back then was how hard she was willing to work to make her daughter happy.

Maybe he didn’t love her now because she wasn’t the same person anymore.

“But that doesn’t mean you don’t love her, and that she doesn’t love you, Wakaba,” he said. “Kids love bad parents all the time. You just need to make it up to her.”

“That won’t make what I’ve done and haven’t done go away.”

“It won’t,” he agreed, “but it can’t hurt. If you just try—”

She shook her head, finally lifting it. Her hands had formed an imprint on her forehead, and her glasses had slipped, but she still looked him in the eye and pushed her papers over.

The top sheet was vaguely familiar for a reason: it was the same as the one that was sitting in his safe, gathering dust and waiting for the day he took it out. Wakaba had filled out most of it already. He knew he was gaping but still said, “Wakaba, what—”

“She needs a better parent than me, and we both know it,” Wakaba said. “All you need to do is sign it, and she’ll be yours.”

His. Futaba would be his—his daughter, his family. Nurses wouldn’t side-eye him in the waiting room anymore. Receptionists at schools wouldn’t try to give him roundabout replies about maintaining the integrity of their school’s reputation, so couldn’t he just put her mother on the phone?

Yes, Futaba would be his. But. “Did you even ask her if this is what she wants, Wakaba?”

“It’s what she needs.”

“This isn’t about what she needs!” he yelled, and slammed a hand over the document for good measure. He couldn’t look at it and not think about how he and Wakaba had come to the same conclusion. “This is about what she wants! If I sign this, what is she going to think? That you’re throwing her away, most likely.”

“Futaba knows better than that.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not going to think it. Haven’t you ever heard that the brain thinks one thing, and the heart thinks another?”

“The heart knows what the brain doesn’t, yes, I’ve heard of it,” she said, “but that’s not what this is about. Futaba is still a child, she can’t be expected to make these kinds of decisions on her own!”

“She’s seventeen!”

“Still a child!” Wakaba insisted.

He thought he saw a shadow up at the top of the stairs. Just a trick of the light, like last time—or so he thought, until he saw the telltale red of her hair dropping between the railings. She was listening. She was right there, listening. “Futaba,” he said, and saw her flinch.

Wakaba followed his gaze and gasped, softly. He thought he heard her curse under her breath, but decided to ignore it. Futaba was close enough to an adult—and had been roaming around online for years, where there was no supervision or censorship—that he knew it didn’t matter if she had or not.

“Futaba,” he tried again, because she didn’t answer him, “there’s something we’d like to ask you. Come downstairs, please.”

She did it reluctantly. The filtered water pitcher he’d given her to keep in her room was clutched in one hand, and the other was balled into at fist at her side. Her face was red and puffy, like she’d heard most of the conversation and had been crying over it, like her mother. She eyed the papers on the table and Wakaba’s neat handwriting in a navy-blue ink. “You didn’t even ask,” she said.

“Sojiro has been better for you than I ever could be,” Wakaba said.

“But you didn’t ask. You asked before.”

“I know I did. That’s why I didn’t need to this time—if you’d want Sojiro to be your guardian, you’d want him to be your father, too, right?”

“No,” Futaba said. Her voice shook.

Wakaba looked surprised. Sojiro suspected he, too, looked much the same, and he swallowed down the hurt.

“Why not?” Wakaba asked, as her surprise gave way to more anger.

“Because he’s not my dad,” Futaba said. “He’s never been my dad. He’s been my friend, and he was your friend, and when you left he was the only one who would have understood how much I missed you.”

Futaba sniffled. Tears slipped down her cheeks. “And now—now you’re just going to give up. You’re not even going to try and be a good mom, you’re not even going to try and make it up to me by being better. We can’t even be friends? We can’t talk to each other about projects or work or anything like that? You don’t want to have to keep raising me, so you’re just going to hand me off to the only one who does?”

“I missed five years, Futaba,” Wakaba told her. “That’s—that’s hard to make up. When I left you were only twelve. You’d barely started puberty, and now—now you’re—”

“Almost an adult,” Futaba gritted out. “And I’m one who can tell that you’re not even trying. You used to try. If I asked enough, you said you’d think about it, and I knew that meant eventually I’d get whatever it was I asked for: time with you, no matter where we went. But you don’t want that now. Did you even want it before? Did you even want _me_?”

“Of course I wanted you, you were all I had left—”

She broke off, paling. Futaba stared at her. Sojiro stared at her.

“Left? Left of what?” Futaba asked.

“Of your father,” Wakaba admitted, though she couldn’t look at either of them, and opted to stare at Sojiro’s accounts. “Your—your dad, Futaba.”

“Dad,” Futaba breathed. “I really—I r-really had a d-dad?”

Sojiro sunk back in his chair, feeling as if the world had disappeared from beneath his feet. He knew it took two to make a baby, and that someone had contributed to Futaba—but he’d never heard of it. Wakaba never talked about her love life with him, except to shoot down his advances. Hell, he had thought she wasn’t interested in love until Futaba came around.

“He was wonderful,” Wakaba said, sounding like every word drove a stake through her heart. As if just recalling him made her hurt. “I loved him so much. I still love him. But he died before you were born, Futaba, and I—I almost lost you.”

Sojiro buried his head in his hands, where the darkness was comforting and made sense.

He hadn’t known. This woman that he had loved for years—he hadn’t known a thing about her. She had shut herself away because losing the love of her own life had hurt so much it had nearly killed their child.

“We were going to get married before he—he died. Before you were born. He was so, _so_ happy about it—the marriage, you, finding a bigger place we could all live together—he would have loved you.” Wakaba pulled out a necklace, worn down with age. Rings glittered on it, with the same dull sheen. “But then the accident happened, and he left us, and then you were all I had I left.”

“Then why didn’t you act like it?”

“I tried,” Wakaba insisted. “I took you to work with me. My coworkers gave up their breaks to watch you if I was busy. I tried learning how to cook, so we’d have something healthy to eat.” She sighed. “Then one of my proposals caught the eye of some of the upper management, and suddenly I didn’t have the time to do all of that. It was work to earn grants for research or throw it all away for you, and I thought—I kept thinking, just a few more months and I’ll be done and can take a break. I wanted to take you to Destinyland when we finished. Or abroad, if I thought you’d like it, or just to the beach—but I wanted a trip where it would be the two of us, together. Where I could make up for being such an awful mother for so long.”

“But you don’t want to anymore.”

“This isn’t about what I want,” Wakaba said. “It’s about what’s best for you, and that’s a parent who doesn’t skip every Parent’s Day at school because she has to work. It’s a parent who can teach you how to take care of yourself, instead of making you live off of fast food everyday.”

Futaba sobbed, one shuddering, wailing breath that seemed to last forever. Sojiro shot up out of his chair as Wakaba sat there, frozen, as her daughter heaved and wheezed and struggled to breathe, struggled to talk through chattering teeth.

“Futaba,” he said, one hand going for her back to try and calm her down—but she shoved the water pitcher into his stomach and pushed him away.

“Y-you don’t get it,” she finally managed to spit out. “You don’t. At all. You’re my—m-my mom, and I’ve—I’ve always been proud of that. A-always. Even when you w-weren’t home, or was t-too busy to come to school. I—I always thought, ‘Mom’s just d-doing important research.’ That’s—that’s what I told everybody, that you were doing important research. But you said it was over and done with now—and now that we can be—be a real f-family again, you don’t want to!”

She screeched the last bit. Sojiro’s ears rang with it— _you don’t want to, Wakaba, and you never did_ —and Wakaba sat there, as still as a statue. Five years was a long time to go without seeing your daughter, but Futaba had gone five, ten, fifteen years barely seeing her own mother. Wakaba had nearly been a stranger in Futaba’s house, and Futaba had still tried to make her happy.

Wakaba—had she ever tried to make Futaba happy? Had she ever tried to understand that what Futaba wanted wasn’t just a proud mother, but also a caring one?

Sojiro felt like a fool. He clutched at Futaba’s pitcher, realizing now more than ever that he’d done the same for years: given Futaba things instead of attention, let her shut herself away instead of finding a way to bond. He’d only started trying to be better now because everything she was used to needed to change—her diet, her lifestyle, her social life—and he knew, deep in his heart, that Wakaba was never going to understand or manage it on her own.

She could barely make toast without burning it. She could barely make salad, or fold clothes, and whenever she cleaned the kitchen table she left streaks.

But Futaba didn’t care. She wanted her mother, flaws and all, like the twelve-year-old girl Sojiro had been left in charge of had wanted her mother.

Futaba crumpled to the floor, still gasping. One hand curled around the cord of her headphones while the other stretched it taut, then gave it slack just to stretch it taut again.

“Futaba,” Wakaba said, so softly that the word seemed thin and fragile. Her mouth worked, but nothing else came out; Wakaba, being a woman of logic, had never understood the maternal instincts every other woman she worked with insisted they had. She had never understood how they could _just know_ that their child was lonely or crying or upset, even when they were miles apart; she had often joked that it must have been some kind of paranoia, to have that constant worry plaguing the back of their minds.

But Futaba didn’t care. She wanted her mother, this distant, lonely woman still grieving the loss of the love of her life. Futaba didn’t want a better mother. She wanted Wakaba.

Sojiro felt numb as he marched to the table, snatched up that offending sheet, stuffed the pitcher under his arm, and tore the sheet into shreds. Neither Wakaba nor Futaba looked at him as he did it, and neither of them looked at him as he said, “Try, Wakaba. Give it a goddamn _try_ , even if you have to think of it like research. Keep notes or a video log or a minutes sheet but do better than doubting yourself. I’m going to bed.”

He left them there, storming off to his room to smoke and change and whatever the hell else he’d need to do to sleep tonight, like shred his own copy of that damn piece of paper. Damn it all, and damn him, too, for being so inconsiderate of what Futaba wanted despite all these years of giving her everything she asked. Of course she wanted her mother, and not a _replacement_ for her.

And then he remembered the water pitcher still stuffed under an armpit.

He could set it on his nightstand and go to bed. He could wait for Futaba and Wakaba to go to bed and then sneak back into the kitchen and put it on the table for Futaba to find when she wandered down for water in the middle of the night, because she would, even though she hated the creaking stairs in the dead of night, hated the thought of waking him up when he already worked so hard and barely got enough sleep as it was.

God, he needed a smoke.

But first, the water pitcher. Futaba would want it back. She probably already thought he’d taken it for a reason, when he’d simply forgotten it was there.

And—this was his house. Why should he feel the need to tiptoe around his own home? He could—he could just put the pitcher back, claim he was going for a walk to cool down a bit, and then smoke outside, maybe pay a visit to Ishida at the secondhand shop, if he was still open, or maybe Yasuda would still be sitting out with his ancient radio. They could chat for a bit. Things would make sense.

And. This was his house. Why should he be afraid of running into anyone else in his own house?

He got up, threw on a light jacket, then snatched up the pitcher. If he slid down the hall in his socked feet to avoid making too much noise, no one else needed to know; as he neared the kitchen he heard voices. Futaba, sniffling. Wakaba, talking through her tears.

He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but a peek into the kitchen showed him both of them on the floor, their glasses set aside as they hugged. Wakaba stroked Futaba’s hair and murmured soft words, and Futaba’s shoulders shook as she replied in tones too high for him to properly hear. The mess of paper scraps he’d carelessly tossed rested by Wakaba’s foot.

Maybe he didn’t need a smoke after all—or a walk, for that matter.

Sojiro set the pitcher down and headed back to bed.


	9. Summer Vacation, Tuesday

Yuuki stared in shock. The counter on his website couldn’t stare back, so it sat there, oblivious to every thought of denial swirling in his head.

This couldn’t be happening. The last he’d checked, he’d had barely four thousand hits. Four thousand individual people searching up his website and commenting things like **wtf is this shit** and trying out money scams on the forum and complaining about how some decision or another had gotten the app deleted from their phones.

How could he go from barely four thousand last month to ten thousand? Was it that post he’d replied to, that guy who’d asked what the cat-thing’s problem was? Was it the girl who’d asked him what all of those viruses did?

He fiddled with the forum. The posts he’d made on Morgana and the viruses had gotten plenty of attention, but then someone had posted a screenshot of Akira in his fancy Ra Cielan clothes, and—

“Fuck,” he said. It was more like a sneeze: involuntary, reactive.

Someone had posted Ren’s missing poster on his forum, and he hadn’t seen it. Someone had then posted Goro’s missing poster, and a screenshot of Goro in an olive-green boy’s kimono, and tons of people were suddenly making the same connection that Ryuji and Futaba and Yusuke had last year: that Yuuki was part of the kidnapping scheme, somehow. People were screaming for his info, his address; people were complaining they couldn’t find anything on the site to link them to anyone in particular; one guy outed himself as a member of Medjed and was whining, over and over, that there was no way an amateur had made this website.

Some small part of him was happy they were using his code to take screenshots. The other part was calling Futaba and groaning in relief when she picked up. “Yo, NPC!” she said.

“Futaba,” he said, and tried in vain to keep his voice steady. “What did you do to my site?”

“I just beefed up security,” she said, like it was as easy as cooking instant ramen. “Unless—did you want them to know who you are and call the cops on you?”

“Well, no,” he said. “And I don’t want them coming to my house and stealing my laptop, either. Have they mentioned that, yet?”

“Nope!” She sounded way too cheery for someone he was trying to guilt-tease. Maybe he just wasn’t any good at it. “Because they can’t _find_ the dinky little apartment you call a house, because _I_ beefed up security! You’re welcome.”

“Yeah, thanks.” Except he was still poring over responses. This thread was huge, and the mystery surrounding it all, even after the Amamiyas and Ms. Akechi had called off the missing persons reports last month, was only bringing in more people. More viewers. More tick marks on his counter.

How had he missed this? Was it his tests? The end-of-semester project?

“You okay?” Futaba asked. “I know some of them are getting rowdy, but I figured it wasn’t my place to do anything there. They’d know you have help, then, you know.”

“As soon as I know what to do about it, I’ll do it,” he told her, but it wasn’t that easy. Anything he said would be used against him, and he didn’t want to mention helping Akira before. Just having these screenshots sitting on his laptop made his fingers itch for his phone; his ears strained for Akira’s voice.

“Suzuna, no!” cried his upstairs neighbor. “Oh, I wish you wouldn’t—”

And anyway, it was just too much temptation. He didn’t want to hog Akira to himself this time—not only had he not been chosen, but it would mean stealing someone else’s phone to do it, and he didn’t want to stoop that low—because Akira was the sort of person who deserved to have millions waiting on him hand and foot, not just helping him out of a hostile dimension.

“Oh, right,” said Futaba, “we’re still on for the beach on Friday, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“No laptops! Mom made me promise, so you have to, too.”

“That’s only something you would do, you know,” he said, wondering what kind of person would bring a laptop to the beach. Futaba would, and then she’d complain about all the sand in the system. “But I won’t, either. It’s not even packed.”

“You’re already packed?” she screeched, and the noise nearly burst his eardrum. “But it’s, like, four days from now! Why would you be packed now?”

“Because it’s not hard for me to throw together beach junk a couple days early and realize I ran out of sunscreen, that’s why.” He’d also wanted a new pair of trunks, which had helped. All he’d done was throw a towel in the bag and called it a day.

“Oh,” Futaba said, more to herself than to him. “Do I—do I have sunscreen? Should I just go buy some, too?”

“Hey,” he said, before she hung up to run out the door, “just one thing: could you tell me if anybody weird visits the site?”

“Weird how?”

“I dunno,” he said, not even sure where he’d been going with it. “Maybe—maybe IPs you can’t track or something. I dunno.”

Apparently she knew what he didn’t. “You think they’re watching? Those people, from that dimension, I mean. If they can send the app out, it stands to reason they can check it, too, but…”

“The app on Yusuke’s phone didn’t appear until Akira got the blueprints for the robot, I think,” Yuuki said. “Which means there has to be some way—something, anything—they’re using to check up on it. I know it’s a stretch to think my site might catch their eye, but, I just.”

He broke off. He just wanted to be sure he wasn’t being used, too. He just wanted to be sure that, despite the all-powerful magic system in place in that other dimension, there was no way they could track him down and snatch him or his friends, too. He just wanted to be sure that Akira wasn’t being fed a steady diet of lies gleaned from the site.

He just wanted. He just wanted.

(He just wanted to think that maybe his amateur site and his poor programs had caught their attention. Look at me, in a way. Leave Akira alone and look at me. Give him some damn space.)

“It’s possible,” Futaba said, slowly, like she almost didn’t believe it. “There was still some code in your app I couldn’t find a use for—I thought it was a progress-checking system. It’d be defunct if you’d completed your goal, which would explain why it seemed so useless, but…”

He sighed. Futaba sighed. The neighbor’s kid upstairs started wailing, and Yuuki could hear her mother swoop in to stop the tears. “Oh, Suzuna,” he imagined her crooning voice to be saying, “Mommy didn’t mean it. There, there, dear.”

Maybe the app was just like another person. Everyone was a universe unto themselves, he’d thought he’d heard once. He couldn’t remember where, just that the speaker had gone on to say that there were depths to other people that no one—not even themselves—would ever know, and there were depths that could only be found when looked at by someone else. The app was like that—its inner workings wholly alien because it was designed in a completely different dimension, which had to be filled with a bunch of code trees and languages Yuuki and Futaba would never understand.

“Maybe we weren’t meant to know,” Yuuki said. “What the app really did or didn’t do isn’t really the point anymore, is it? It’s done its job. Can we really come in after and wonder at which part does what? How would—how would it even store his memories? Did it even do that?”

“I dunno,” Futaba said, “but there’s one thing I do know—we have a piece of alien technology in our hands, Nishima. Alien tech. If we can somehow reverse engineer it, we could be in contact with real, live aliens!”

Aliens. As if. No matter how smart they were, no matter how much like people they seemed, the men and women of Ra Ciela were all heartless monsters hell-bent on saving themselves. It was one of the reasons most of them couldn’t use magic anymore: they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—open their hearts up to each other, much less to the spirits that made their magic happen. It was one of the reasons they had to rely on a man-made machine that held Goro captive inside of it.

They didn’t think. They didn’t question. They took what they could and screamed for more, for anything else, when everything they could take was gone.

“I don’t think these are aliens we want to talk to, Futaba,” he said, firmly. Yuuki certainly didn’t want to talk to them, at least. There were a handful of good people on that dead planet but what could a handful of people do, when faced with the task of saving the rest of the ungrateful scavengers? “They didn’t even try to send Goro back when he was done what they wanted him to do. They didn’t even seem to care about his well-being after, either. Do you really want to talk to people who do that kind of thing to a seven-year-old? Do you really want to talk to people who torture their would-be saviors?”

Futaba lost all of that earlier enthusiasm. She sounded deflated when she asked, “Did they really torture them?”

“I know what I heard. People don’t cry like that in their sleep if they haven’t been hurt, Futaba.”

Akira, whimpering and moaning in the dead of night when Yuuki couldn’t sleep and had checked up on him. Akira, screaming himself and Yuuki awake when they both fell asleep with the app still running. How it made sense that the farther along into his memories they got, the less sleep he seemed to want: they were tearing open old wounds had been left to fester under the surface until a rot had set in, after ripping off the bandages just to see what lay beneath. They’d had no idea what they were doing, and Akira had thought that if he just never slept the past couldn’t catch up with him.

Yuuki was stupid for just figuring it out. Yuuki was stupid for a lot of damn things, but this had to take the cake: that Akira had been hurt badly, and needed Yuuki far more than Yuuki needed Akira.

But there was nothing he could do, anymore. He’d left it up to Akira and his mystery helpers. The site was like holding up a first-aid book to a man with a broken bone: it could do nothing except instruct and wish everything got better, the same way Yuuki was.

“Oh,” Futaba said.

He sighed. “Sorry. You can—you can show it to whoever, but I don’t—I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t want to talk to people who can ruin lives without even thinking about it.”

“Guess you can’t talk to a lot of people, then.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he mumbled. It was hard to describe what he meant. Evil, malicious people, obviously. Bad guys like the ones on Featherman where the villains wanted to conquer the world or destroy the economy. But it was guys like Kamoshida, too. Guys like Madarame and Shido and Kobayakawa, who only had their own self-interests in mind, who couldn’t think of anyone else as anything other than a stepping stone to get what they wanted.

But, he guessed, it was also every conversation that went wrong and ended up with someone dead. It was every hacked bank account, every drug dealer looking for easy money because they didn’t know anything else, every thief who saw that someone had more than they needed.

(It was every son and daughter who wasn’t the person their parents wanted them to be.)

“Well, I don’t know what you meant,” Futaba grumbled. “This is almost the first I’ve heard of it. I know you mentioned him and Goro going through some bad stuff, but I didn’t think it was like that.”

“I didn’t know back then,” he admitted. “Akira—he didn’t like to worry me, I think. The memories were pretty bad sometimes, and I think he knew I didn’t like watching them when they were. He’d talk about it for a little while after but then he’d just… stop, and wouldn’t bring it up again.”

Yuuki had thought it was because it hurt to talk about it so soon—to have to remember what he’d done, over and over again, and know that there was no way to go back in time and change any of it—or because Akira was waiting for the chance to properly process it. Some of it had been a lot to take in—some of the memories lasted mere minutes, and others had gone on for hours, it seemed—and Yuuki knew that his own head was often spinning by the end.

He’d never thought to ask how Akira had been handling it—Akira, always so quick to smile and laugh and distract, always so quick to tease and flirt and offer to teach Yuuki to cook.

“Oh,” he said, voice trembling. He’d never thought to ask, because Akira never gave him a reason to. Akira had been hurting, and Yuuki hadn’t been able to see it. The fight they’d had before Akira disconnected him had been their only fight, and while Yuuki knew that good couples who could talk to each other didn’t fight, he also knew that that meant he and Akira weren’t a good couple. Akira had hidden things from Yuuki, and Yuuki had hidden things from Akira: important yet silly things, like how they were really, truly feeling.

“What?” Futaba asked.

“I didn’t know,” Yuuki said. It was all that could come out of his mouth, it seemed. “I didn’t know. I didn’t know a thing.”

“What?” Futaba insisted.

“About Akira,” he said, and laid it out for her. He’d been selfish, concerned only for his own well-being. He’d been so self-absorbed he hadn’t been able to see Akira’s suffering.

“Well, duh,” Futaba said, when he was done. “That’s what happens when you’re hurting. You can’t think of anybody else half the time because they’re not gonna help you out. And besides, it didn’t seem like you had that many options to confront him about it, either.”

“But that last week we could talk,” he reminded her, “like, really, actually talk. It was almost face-to-face. I could have asked him then, couldn’t I? If there was something he didn’t think he could have told me?”

“Weren’t you busy with Leblanc and focusing on how your mom kicked you out? Oh, and weren’t you sure that Akira’s big secret had to do with the robot?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. “But—”

“But nothing!” she cried. “If he didn’t want you to know, he didn’t want you to know! You can ask him when he comes back! You can figure this thing out together, and be all sappy about it the whole time, too, and then you can cry and kiss and do gross couple stuff like riding a horse off into the sunset!”

“I don’t think that last part actually happened… to anybody, ever. Also, I don’t know how to ride a horse, Futaba.”

“Well, then you can start by learning,” she said. “I won’t be satisfied until you’re a stereotypical Prince Charming, understand? This is a fairytale romance, and you deserve a happy ending!”

“I don’t really understand where this is coming from.”

“Mom and I went on a Destiny movie binge on Sunday. You guys will be a gross Destinyland couple one day, I guarantee it. Until then, you’re just being insecure.”

“Insecure?”

“Totally insecure. Extremely insecure. You wouldn’t be thinking junk like this if Akira were still around, right?”

“Probably not,” he said. “But if Akira were still around I could have just asked him myself.”

“Then ask him,” Futaba said, stressing each word, “when he comes back.”

“Do you think he’d want to tell me? That he’d been—tortured, or persuaded through force, or whatever they did?”

Futaba went silent for a while. After some time, she softly said, “Would you tell him about Kamoshida and your mom?”

“I’d have to tell him about Mom, at least,” he said. “Akira—he’d want to know why she wouldn’t want to meet him. He’d want to know why only Dad ever wanted to visit. I’d have to tell him she hates me.”

“And Kamoshida?”

He reached for Akira’s ring. Kamoshida wasn’t quite as touchy of a subject as he’d thought it would remain. Kamoshida was in jail for the abuse of his teams, and while it rankled Yuuki and Suzui to no end that he’d gotten off scot-free on all of the molestation charges, they knew nothing would have been done. That was how Japan was.

Yuuki wondered of it was better elsewhere. Probably not.

But eventually it would come up. Ryuji would wind up making some remark, or Kamoshida would get out of jail for good behavior, and then Akira would want to know why it bothered Yuuki so much, or why it bothered Ryuji or Suzui so much.

Akira would want to know. He was just like that.

“Maybe not at first,” Yuuki said. “But—eventually. Eventually he’d have to know. Kamoshida’s not going to stay behind bars forever, and I know he’ll never teach again, but I—I just…”

“Exactly,” Futaba said, reaching the same conclusion. “You’d have to tell him. Which means he’ll have to tell you, too. Someday, when he’s ready, he’ll talk it out with you.”

“I hope so.”

“I know so! You’re going to be a gross, mushy couple, and that means talking about your feelings, you know! Even the bad ones!”

“Alright,” he said. “Okay.”

“Okay?!” Futaba shrieked, and he laughed.

And then kept laughing. He could barely imagine what it would be like to hold Akira’s hand. Talking about their feelings would have to take a back seat to figuring out how, and if, they could actually love each other.

He wasn’t thinking it was going to be so hard anymore. He missed Akira now more than ever, and he would miss him more tomorrow than today.

(It was strange, how quickly he could bounce back with someone to talk to around. It was strange, how easily his doubts were being discarded, and how easily he was letting them go. They would come back later, in the middle of the night when he was trying to sleep, and claw at his mind then. But for now, he laughed.)

“Sheesh,” said Futaba, even though he could hear her grin over the phone.

“You know, I never asked how you’re liking school, did I?”

Futaba groaned. “Don’t remind me, I might die. Did Sojiro tell you my last composition score? Thirty-six! What I wrote was at least a forty, and he doesn’t believe me!”

“Write him an essay that proves otherwise, then,” he said.

“Not to mention how much older I am than everyone else,” Futaba grumbled. “Everyone looks at me funny. I can’t stand it.”

“It must be hard.”

“It is. Even the guys in my course look at me weird. It can’t be that strange having a girl in a tech course, can it?”

He snorted. “They’re probably thinking that, yeah. The way I see it, they’ve got a chance at a girl right in their own club. No need to go looking for one.”

“Ugh, ew,” Futaba groaned. “Do boys actually do that?”

“Yeah,” he said, thinking about all of the volleyball players that had started dating just to cope with Kamoshida—which made him think of the wide berth Suzui had been given, most of the time. No one had dared to ask her out because of Takamaki, or because she was so clearly Kamoshida’s favorite that anyone who did was likely to get Kamoshida’s special treatment.

Yuuki shuddered just thinking about it.

“Uh, anyway, yeah,” he said, “yeah, they do. If they go quiet when you show up it’s probably because they were talking about girls, or robots, and they don’t know how you’ll take talk about either of those. I guess.”

“Huh,” Futaba said. “So that’s why.”

“So they do it, huh?”

“Yeah, they do. But it could just be me, too. It’s hard to tell sometimes. Anyways, it’s seven, Mom’s calling me for dinner, bye!”

And before he could say anything else, she hung up. He stared at his phone as the screen went dark, then back to his laptop.

Addressing the Akira situation probably wouldn’t be good. People were already guessing Akira had ties to someone named Yuuki—he had shouted it at some point or another, and while Yuuki desperately wanted to watch the videos they had posted, he held himself back. If he did he would be up all night, worrying over every decision these strangers made, watching every video and taking way too many screenshots of Akira.

It would be easier not to know.

It would be easier not to think about it. Akira and Akira’s well-being were out of Yuuki’s hands now. There was nothing he could do, aside from keep the forum up and running so all of these strangers could learn from each other’s mistakes.

But.

They were treating it like a game. The choices, the fights, the outrageous sci-fi setting—clearly all for their own entertainment, and now he had people thinking the missing kids were somehow in on the game, or that Yuuki was the developer and had shoehorned their likenesses in to get pity plays.

Fuck that, Yuuki thought.

He made a single, stickied post right where everyone could see it. No body, just a title: **I just want them to come home.**

Because this wasn’t about Yuuki or the Amamiyas or the entertainment of thousands. This was about Akira and Goro and the dead world they were still trying to save. This was about another dimension full of kidnappers who thought they could get away with things like this.

Fuck that.

Then he logged out, shut his laptop, and ignored the text message notification on his screen. Yamada, probably, wondering if Yuuki was going to the mixer tomorrow like he said he’d think about. Yamada had practically shoved his face into Yuuki’s to get his phone number, and Yuuki was regretting giving in and handing it over.

Instead, he asked Ryuji to move their gym day up to tomorrow night. Ryuji was too ecstatic about the beach trip to say no to an early gym day—or maybe he just liked going to the gym.

The guy was weird.

Yuuki flicked through photos and videos on his phone while dinner simmered on the stove. Akira, a couple of cat videos, Akira again, a few bar codes he was going to add to his Textter later, Akira, Mona looking pissed at Futaba’s camera, Akira. Akira.

A video he didn’t remember taking nestled in the depths of his phone. He didn’t recognize the thumbnail; maybe it was another video Futaba had taken that week she’d had his phone two years ago. Yuuki had never been able to go through all of them, but he thought they were all grouped together—so what was this one doing way in the back?

His thumb rested over it. A video he hadn’t seen, the thumbnail black static.

The timer went off. Yuuki jumped, and before he knew it music was pouring out of his phone’s tinny speakers. He recognized the voice even as he hurried to move the pot off the stove: Akira’s, singing about lost chances and wishes to make everything right again. His voice was clear despite the shitty phone speakers—or maybe that was just Yuuki, hearing him over everything else in the room, _wanting_ to hear him over everything else in the room—even Suzuna upstairs, wailing and stomping her feet again.

He let the video play out while his dinner cooled. It was less a video and more an audio file, as the screen displayed nothing more than black static. He thought he could see Akira underneath, hidden in the white space in flecks and pieces.

He blinked. The screen blurred, and it no longer mattered.

For those few minutes, Akira was there.

* * *

Futaba dug through her closet, increasingly frantic when her hands pulled out yet more jeans and shorts and funny t-shirts and a dusty ball of socks that looked like Mona had chewed on it and then forgotten. Her mother, attracted by the noise, stood in her doorway and raised a brow at the clothes being flung across the room.

(Futaba only vaguely worried for her Featherman figurines. And her computer, still running a decompression on a very nice doujin Futaba had slaved over spreadsheets for.)

“You know, Futaba,” her mother said, “if you don’t have one—”

“I have one!” She pulled out another shirt. This one was pink and featured Goodbye Kitty on the front and was three sizes too small. “I know I do! It’s in here somewhere!”

“That’s a shame,” Wakaba said, as the shirt joined the rest draped across her computer chair. “Because I was hoping we could go shopping for some, together. Mother-daughter time, like you asked for.”

Futaba wasn’t sure how she felt about seeing her mother in a swimsuit. She _was_ sure, however, that Mona had made a small nest in her closet at some point, because everything at the bottom was coming out covered in dusty cat hair. Mona, hiding under her bed in his newer, permanent nest, slept on, unaware that the thing he’d deigned to make a good bed was her old school swimsuit, **Isshiki 6-B** smudged by cat slobber.

It, too, was three sizes too small. Wakaba picked up a shirt, glanced at the tag, and said, “You could always donate these, Futaba. They don’t even fit anymore.”

“I guess so,” Futaba said, holding up what was left of her old swimsuit. It smelled like cat.

“We’ll have to wash them first, though, or no one will want them,” her mother went on.

“Uh-huh,” Futaba said, wondering what size she was now. She could always order it online and avoid the scrutiny and shame of using a public fitting room and trying on clothes.

When was the last time she’d gone clothes shopping? When was the last time she’d gone anyplace but Shibuya or Akihabara or school?

Her computer pinged. Futaba, already getting lost in crowds and feeling her palms go sweaty at the thought of being surrounded by people, barely heard it. It was probably just the NPC or monkey boy, anyway.

“ _Do_ you want to go shopping with me?” Wakaba asked.

Monkey boy had asked if his foreigner friend could come with them on their beach trip. Futaba had nothing against Takani, or whatever her name was, so naturally she said it was okay.

It was not okay. Takani was a model who would look good even in a school swimsuit. Futaba resembled a board on the best of days.

… Maybe Takani wouldn’t mind helping her pick out a swimsuit. She had to have good taste; better than Futaba or Wakaba, at least. Wakaba thought solid color one-pieces were good enough, but Wakaba was her mom. Moms had weird taste in swimsuits.

“I do,” Futaba said. “I do wanna go, I just. I thought I had one.”

“And you do, it just doesn’t fit anymore.”

Wakaba waited for anything more. Futaba picked clumps of fur off the rest of the clothes in her closet, rolling them between her fingers, then finally said, “I don’t like crowds.”

“I know,” Wakaba said. “But if you want a new swimsuit—”

“I know,” Futaba cut in. She knew she was pouting. Kana hadn’t even messaged her ever since asking to meet up. Things felt very bleak.

If this were a game, she could just buy one online. It would be one-size-fits-all and cute, too, and she wouldn’t have to brave summer vacation crowds just to try on swimsuits.

But if she didn’t, she’d be swimming in one of Wakaba’s old ones. It would sag in all the wrong places and cling in others and Futaba thought it was kind of gross, that her mom would be willing to lend her a swimsuit, even if Wakaba had never worn it herself.

“I can do it,” Futaba said. “I can—I can brave the crowds. I think.”

Wakaba patted her on the head. It felt weird, after all this time, to have a mom who did that. “If you’re sure, dear.”

Futaba nodded. They collected up the clothes that no longer fit, shoved them all into a pile larger than Futaba’s arms could possibly carry, then carried them downstairs. They would wash them tomorrow and hang them out to dry in the sun, and Futaba’s arms stung with effort as she retreated back upstairs.

Wakaba was trying to be a mother, at least, like Futaba had practically begged her to. Wakaba was trying, even though it stung sometimes that Wakaba didn’t understand her the same way Sojiro did, or pretended to. Futaba was getting the feeling that he was careful with her just because she was different; he gave her a little too much distance, sometimes. It was a hard feeling to precisely describe.

He just… did. Especially now that Wakaba was back.

She sorted through the rest of her clothes for something to wear tomorrow, settling on shorts and a tank top and her favorite jacket despite the heat they’d be facing. She didn’t have much of anything else; the last time she had worn a skirt that wasn’t part of her uniform had been back in middle school, on a weekend trip with Wakaba to the aquarium. Futaba had begged her to take her. Futaba had also begged for a stuffed penguin from the gift shop.

(Did she still have that penguin somewhere?)

“Mona,” she called as she entered her room. Sometimes Mona meowed back; most of the time he ignored her. This was one of those times, as he was right where she left him, snoozing under her bed.

She snapped a picture, then turned to her computer. Her doujin was decompressed, NPC’s site was doing alright, and she had a notification from Textter: a bunch of garbled text from Kana.

Within minutes she had the tracker open. Wherever she was, Kana was moving fast, and Futaba struggled to place her until she realized Kana was moving in a straight line. On a train, or a plane, although who would let a seventeen-year-old on a plane by herself?

Security, probably.

Before she could do much else, Kana sent her another message: **can’t do it anymore**

 **Where are you?** she sent back. Kana replied with a train line that dead-ended in Omotesando. She had a one-way ticket and a bag of clothes and things she couldn’t bear to leave behind.

 **Anything electronic?** Futaba asked.

Just her phone. That was fine—that was good, actually, even though the chances were high that Kana’s parents were tracking it, if they knew she was gone. Kana said they didn’t without Futaba needing to ask. She had told them she was sleeping over at a friend’s house to get started on summer homework. Said friend didn’t exist. Her parents wouldn’t be worried until tomorrow night.

Futaba sat back and thought it over. First things first would be either getting rid of the phone or the tracker, and Futaba couldn’t do either by herself in her room.

Well, she could, but Kana wouldn’t appreciate that.

Still, Omotesando. At nearly ten at night, too. Futaba wondered how many drunks were wandering around, how many schoolkids were out breaking curfew on the first day of summer break. Lots, probably. Enough for one or two to bother Kana.

Futaba didn’t want her to brave Tokyo, alone, at night, while clearly upset. But if she went somewhere Wakaba would want to know why, and Futaba wasn’t sure how to explain it.

She sent out texts on her phone to the guys: **Where are you?**

 **Home** , sent monkey-boy. **Why?**

 **Inokashira, sketching the lake** , sent Inari, hours later. **It’s quite lovely at this time of night** —

She tuned out the rest of his text. NPC, even ten minutes later when Kana was starting to send her more desperate-sounding messages, didn’t reply.

Fine, whatever.

(Yuuki, meanwhile, was lying in bed with the new video on repeat, trying to commit the lyrics to memory. He could mouth about half. It felt like an accomplishment.)

 **I need somebody to go to Omotesando** , she wound up sending. She bit her lip, wondering. If she didn’t mention who Kana was, would they want to go? Would they go anyway, just because she asked?

No. If she wanted to help Kana, they needed to know some of it. Not the nitty-gritty but enough: that Kana was her friend (kind of) and needed help, and really, really needed someone who knew Tokyo better than Futaba to make sure she got… somewhere safe.

Here, Futaba wanted to say. Bring her here, where she’ll know someone. Plus, she won’t have to worry about being surrounded by a bunch of boys.

But monkey-boy barely batted an eye at her lack of explanation. **Sure** , he said.

 **I suppose I may as well** , Inari followed.

Futaba sighed. For once, her hands shook over the keyboard; this wasn’t Ren Amamiya’s disappearance footage, or NPC’s alien program—this was a life, and the life of someone she knew. If Kana got caught her parents would put her under lock and key and would profit like kings while Kana suffered.

She wound up sending Kana barebones instructions and descriptions of her friends. They were going to meet her at the station. They were going to take her someplace safe. Futaba was going to need remote access to her phone to fake out the tracker, because if it disappeared entirely that would alert her parents faster that something was wrong.

It all sounded skeevy as hell once she had it typed up and sent, but what could she do? And if Kana wanted, she could always turn around at the next station, go home, and pretend it never happened.

But she agreed to follow every step to the letter. Alibaba was next to a stranger to her, but what other choice did Kana have? Go back to her parents? Run off on her own, without any kind of help?

 **you said you wanted to help me** , Kana sent. **I guess I’ll see if you meant it or not, isshiki**

And Futaba sighed.

* * *

Yusuke was fending off another group of drunk businesswomen when Ryuji arrived, still in his loungewear and with his hair flat, not an ounce of product in it.

“Hey, dude,” Ryuji said, clapping him on the arm and dragging him away from several scandalized drunks.

“Hey, yourself,” Yusuke said, and tugged his arm away once the drunks went on their way. Then his lips quirked and he added, “Or, should I call you Abu?”

Ryuji scowled. “Dude, don’t. Not right now.”

“Are you angry you don’t get to play the hero, Ryuji?”

“Abu’s a theivin’ little rat, Yusuke. Half that movie woulda been fine without him touching everything that sparkled.”

Yusuke still chuckled. “She does call you monkey. I suppose that’s how she sees you.”

Ryuji elbowed him in the side. “And I guess that makes you a conniving fox, then.”

“Conniving, hm,” Yusuke said. It fit, really. He was churning out more lies and half-truths, and making more bargains than ever before, now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had enjoyed a conversation without guilt burning a hole in his gut. “And Yuuki is a—what does she call him?”

“An NPC,” Ryuji said. “It’s—in a game, it’s a character you can’t control. They’re shopkeeps and villagers and they tend to look really bland compared to the heroes and never have anything interesting to say.”

“How rude,” Yusuke said. Futaba had clearly never watched Yuuki’s face light up at the sight—or the thought—of Akira. She had clearly never sat down and actually talked to him, either; he had plenty of interesting things to say, even if Yusuke was struggling to remember any at the moment.

Ryuji bumped his arm. Yusuke rubbed the spot as he watched the trains pull in. “She don’t really mean it,” Ryuji assured him, then frowned. “Except sometimes. Maybe all the time. It’s hard to tell.”

“I know,” Yusuke said, because that was what people said even when they didn’t, sometimes. That Futaba could tease them all with nicknames one moment and then mean them the next—how was anyone supposed to keep track?

There was a girl coming off a nearby train, a suitcase in one hand and a phone in the other. She looked around, frantic, scanning faces and clothes until she spotted Yusuke, standing nearly a head over everyone else in the crowd. She must have been Futaba’s friend, the emergency, because she headed their way.

“Um, are you—” she said, glancing at her phone one more time.

“Aladdin,” Yusuke supplied, and gestured to Ryuji, “and Abu, at your service.”

“‘sup,” Ryuji said, eloquent as ever. “Y’know it’s not too late to go back home.”

The girl shook her head; her glasses slipped and fell down her nose, and she adjusted them. “You know Alibaba. I—I have to trust you.”

Ryuji and Yusuke shared a look. Everything about this was… off. Futaba’s secrecy, her urgent message, her friend coming in on a ten o’clock train and needing a very sudden escort…

Well, if Yusuke didn’t return home, he was expecting a good explanation.

“If you say so,” Ryuji eventually said. “You want one of us to take your bag? It looks pretty heavy.”

She shook her head again, and gripped the handle even tighter. Yusuke had a sudden feeling he knew what was going on; hadn’t he wished to do much the same for years? Hadn’t he always decided not to, in the end, because he never had a place to run to?

Ryuji only shrugged. “Alright,” he said, and motioned for her to follow. They bought her a ticket to Yongenjaya, used their passes, and made sure to sit beside her on the ride over.

Yusuke’s phone pinged. Futaba, wanting to know if her friend was okay, if they were on their way over, if she was hungry.

Was she? He asked and she nodded, imperceptible except for the sway of her hair. It looked as if she had taken scissors to it; parts were uneven, and others slanted, and far more had been chopped off the back than she had likely hoped.

Yusuke didn’t bring it up. If she had run away from home, maybe a forced haircut had been the final straw.

They were near silent on the ride over, Ryuji occasionally checking his phone and sending a text. His mother, Yusuke guessed, wanting to know why he had to leave so suddenly, and so late. Nakanohara, before the bet, would have been concerned if Yusuke had left the apartment so late at night; now he almost didn’t notice enough to remember to buy groceries. It wasn’t a bad development. Yusuke had just gotten used to someone who cared enough to put food on the table, and it was oddly difficult to go back to the way things had been at Madarame’s.

Perhaps he and Nakanohara needed to have a talk about that.

There weren’t many people getting off at the Yongenjaya station, but Ryuji and Yusuke still formed a small barrier between Futaba’s friend and the rest of them as she hoisted her bag up the stairs and stared at her feet. Sneakers, slightly used. Hardly summer vacation worthy, since Yusuke had seen half of his female classmates in flip-flops and the other half in sandals last week. Togo, when he had seen her last, had slipped her feet out of simple loafers and curled her legs under her as they played shogi in the empty church.

That Togo would dare to do so in a church, of all places—Yusuke had no idea what she was thinking, if it was really alright, if the fact that she had wiped her seat down with disinfectant after had made it better or worse.

He didn’t understand her. Then again, he wasn’t actively trying to. His life was too full at the moment to spare much time for idle games of shogi, but he did enjoy going and not thinking about any of it while the games lasted.

Perhaps he would go more often over the break, then.

They met Boss at Leblanc as he locked the door. When he turned and saw them, all he asked was, “So you’re Kana, then?”

Futaba’s friend—Kana—only nodded again. Boss sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose; Yusuke wondered how many people were living in that house now. Three, since Futaba’s mother had apparently not gone house-hunting yet. Kana would make it four. Did Boss have space for a spare futon anywhere in that house? Did he have the budget to feed another mouth for however long this was going to last?

Yusuke thought of futons crammed together on the floor of the atelier. He thought of the closet so packed with clothes that some students had to leave theirs packed away in boxes or suitcases, and the meager breakfasts and dinners that turned into scraps the more people sat at the table. Everyone had an equal share. No one received more than anyone else.

Except Madarame, of course.

Whatever was going on, though, Boss had a bit more insight than he or Ryuji. It rankled Yusuke, and for reasons he couldn’t identify. Was it because he was one of the ones who had to drop everything—his sketch of the lake by moon- and lamplight woefully half-finished, and fated to remain that way—for no other reason than because Futaba wanted him to?

Was it because he wasn’t used to the secrecy anymore? Was it because he was the one learning and knowing everything about his friends without them knowing everything about himself?

(If telling them would be easy, he would have done it by now.)

But instead of asking, he kept his mouth shut, just as Madarame would have liked. Ryuji’s jaw worked, but he said nothing, either, glancing every so often at Kana’s bag or at her haircut.

Boss unlatched the gate in front of his house; the door swung open, Futaba’s vibrant hair glowing like fire in the light of the hall behind her. Kana paused; Wakaba walked up behind her daughter and drew her away from the door, and only then did Kana enter the yard.

“Thanks for this,” Boss told them, as Kana pushed her bag through the door—Wakaba took it—and wrestled her shoes off.

“Oh, uh, no prob,” Ryuji said. “Night, Boss.”

“Yes, good night,” Yusuke said. Kana moved away from the door, further into the house. He couldn’t see anything else, despite wanting to.

He closed his eyes for a few long seconds. Long enough for the gate and the door to creak shut; long enough for Ryuji to start fidgeting beside him.

The only thing he was angry about was the secrecy, he eventually decided. Futaba was entitled to her own life with her own secrets that she didn’t have to share, but it felt different when she called upon her friends to help and then refused to say anything.

“Must be serious,” Ryuji eventually said, when he tired of the silence.

“I imagine it must be, yes,” Yusuke said, and let Ryuji tug him back down the alleys. This felt like a colossal waste of time. His sketch could have been finished by now, had it not been for Futaba.

But the sketch wasn’t the problem. He’d planned to paint when the sketch was done, and now that plan was ruined for the night. He couldn’t take the feeling of creating back home with him.

He couldn’t stand to sit in that apartment, empty and silent except for Nakanohara’s scribblings. Yusuke swore he could hear every failure bounce out of his wastebasket and onto the floor, some nights, when painting left him too nervous to sleep. He wondered if Nakanohara was sleeping. He had to be, surely, or it would mean that he was going to crash soon—and for days, if Yusuke was remembering correctly.

Nakanohara had a job, now. Nakanohara was a guardian, now.

So why was Yusuke suddenly the one who had to watch him, to make sure he ate and bathed and went to sleep? Why was Yusuke suddenly the one who had to make sure there weren’t ink stains on any of Nakanohara’s good work shirts?

The deal was starting to seem like a bad thing. One painting had yielded all of this mess, and Yusuke was the one left to clean it up.

He hadn’t thought of that. He barked out a laugh at his own idiocy.

“What?” Ryuji asked.

“Nothing,” Yusuke assured him, but Ryuji stopped in the middle of the alley and stared at him. Scrutinizing, the way Madarame used to look at the works his students gave him to display under his own name, as if he ever had the right to judge and choose what was worthy.

“Nah, it’s something,” Ryuji decided. “Dunno what, though—did you eat today?”

“Nakanohara and I have breakfast and dinner together,” Yusuke supplied. “Today it was a Japanese-style breakfast and omelet rice for dinner.”

Yusuke made both. He had had a brief moment of triumph over not burning the fish this time that was quickly doused when Nakanohara hadn’t noticed. Nakanohara hadn’t updated the chore list on the fridge in weeks, either. Nakanohara likely didn’t remember Yusuke even existed.

“Did you sleep, then?”

“Of course.” A full five hours, not that he was going to tell Ryuji that. Ryuji would worry over him even more, and that was the last thing he wanted.

Ryuji sighed. “Okay, well, whatever it is—you need a break. Come to my place. Ma’s been asking about all of you anyway, and seeing you in person’ll be better than me telling her you’re all fine. We can watch bad reality TV and you can do your art snob thing at their outfits or the lighting or the set design. Okay?”

“I am not an art snob,” Yusuke argued, fumbling for a reason to refuse. Bad TV was still a distraction—was still noise, and light, and a mostly full apartment—and Ryuji’s mother would surely badger him late into the night with questions on his studies or his art or his relationships.

That was what mothers did, didn’t they? Badger everyone about their love lives?

“Nah, you are,” Ryuji said, with a grin. “Total snob. You argued with us over the positioning of our graduation ribbons on that table for hours, dude. That’s art snob shit.”

“And it bothers you,” Yusuke guessed. “My—my art snobbery.”

“When you start talking about millimeters, dude, _then_ it does,” Ryuji said with a wince. “But the rest of the time, it’s just what makes you, you. Like I am with running, or ‘taba with her computers, or Yuuki with—uh, I guess Akira.”

Ryuji had started them back down the alley without Yusuke even noticing. He was dead-set on this sleepover, then, if students in college were allowed to call it that. Yusuke would have to safeguard his phone well, lest Ryuji discover just how deeply Yuuki’s obsession—his _love_ , Yusuke told himself with a vague feeling of despair—was returned. It was becoming obvious that Akira’s love was so deep and boundless that he refused to speak of Yuuki out of a fear of harming the other boy in some way, as if he knew the kind of damage it would cause Yuuki if his helpers heard even a hint of his involvement.

Their own actions a year ago notwithstanding, of course. They had at least looked for evidence _before_ deciding whether to hand Yuuki’s phone over to the police; Yusuke knew that no one would be so kind as to give him the benefit of the doubt, not after the post he’d made just that evening that had sent Yusuke scrambling out to the lake. No one would believe he wasn’t somehow involved in all of it after that.

“Ma,” Ryuji called, and finally relaxed his grip, “I’m home. Yusuke’s here, too.”

Yusuke blinked. Mrs. Sakamoto materialized out of thin air and stared back. “I made tea,” she said. Yusuke pulled his shoes off, lining them up beside Ryuji’s.

“Ma,” Ryuji groaned.

“Tea sounds lovely,” Yusuke said, distracted by the collection of photos and old art projects hung up on the wall. Ryuji drew as well at age eleven as Yusuke at age five, and he stared in disbelief at the date. “Thank you.”

Mrs. Sakamoto beamed at him, then retreated back into the kitchen, where there were three cups of tea still steaming sitting on the table. She rummaged through the cupboards and came up with a bag of cookies, and another of potato chips.

It wasn’t the kind of thing one normally had with tea, but the Sakamotos were already different from many other families; what was one more thing to add to the list?

“Ma, seriously,” Ryuji groaned again when she sat down. “I told Yusuke we’d watch bad TV, not talk.”

So the tea was some kind of code; she _did_ want to badger him about his love life. Yusuke was suddenly too wary to even enter the kitchen, but the cups were cooling. There were snacks that Yusuke hadn’t needed to drag out of the cupboards and prepare himself. He could still smell their dinner on the air—some kind of meat, and teriyaki. Pots and pans dried by the sink.

It was the dishes that sent Yusuke tumbling into a nearby chair, his bag falling to the floor with a thunk that would have been worrying if he was paying enough attention to it. The dishes he and Nakanohara were supposed to do together, because that was what one did when one lived with someone else: help with the chores, the cleaning, the cooking.

But, instead, Nakanohara had dived into the bet, into art, and it was Yusuke’s own fault.

Ryuji sighed and sat down. Yusuke heard him spoon sugar into his cup and stir it.

He couldn’t take his eyes off the dishes. When had Nakanohara last helped? Two weeks ago? Three?

“Is it alright if I call you Yusuke?” Mrs. Sakamoto asked, and his head jerked in her direction. Someone had passed him the sugar, and Ryuji took a handful of chips and shoved them in his mouth.

“I—yes, of course,” Yusuke said.

She pushed the sugar closer. “It certainly has been a while, hasn’t it?”

“It has,” he agreed, and took a sip of his tea as it was. Nothing more than slightly-flavored water, though it smelled exquisite. Chamomile, most likely, since it was so late. He sat there for a time, enjoying the warmth of the cup in his hands. It was so much different from a brush, or from his phone. Nowadays when he was done with Akira he was too spent to even think of painting; he was too spent to even think at all, most of the time.

At this rate, Nakanohara would finish his painting before Yusuke was done any of his three.

He sipped at his tea. It still tasted of nothing, so he spooned out some sugar and stirred it in. Mrs. Sakamoto studied him as he did it, and when he pushed a lock of hair behind his ear, she said, “Your hair has gotten so long, too. Do you tie it back when you paint, Yusuke?”

“Ah, no,” he said. “I’m not even aware of it, most of the time.”

Nakanohara had been making sure it was neat and trim. Nakanohara had a set of clippers somewhere, and had sat Yusuke down for trims every so often. It was better than Madarame’s uneven cuts—better than the hackjob to Kana’s hair—and Yusuke had been learning how to do it himself. Nakanohara had been teaching him.

Every second thought he had tonight came back to Nakanohara.

Mrs. Sakamoto watched his face while her son downed chips and cookies and looked vaguely embarrassed. Yusuke watched her back, as level and steady as Madarame had taught him.

_We needn’t give anyone reason to doubt, Yusuke, that you’re cared for and happy, understand?_

_But I’m not happy_ , Yusuke had thought back then. He’d been hungry, and he had worn holes through all of his socks, and at night in the winter his blankets were too thin, so he spent the long hours shivering in the dark of an empty room that used to have so many people in it Yusuke had slept crammed against the wall. It had made him think how he would never have people in his life again, that he would be attached to Madarame for eternity, through death and beyond.

Back then, Yusuke wouldn’t have believed the thought of sitting at a table with a friend and his mother, sipping tea and eating snacks at midnight. Yusuke Kitagawa back then had had no friends to worry over his well-being, much less whether he ate or slept or if his hair got in the way while he painted.

His face burned with shame. His eyes burned with tears.

It felt like a silly thing to be upset about. Dishes drying by the sink; food packed in cupboards; that Yusuke even had the option to replace his shirts when they developed holes instead of wearing more underneath to deal with the draft, because Madarame had never kept spare thread and needles at the atelier. Having friends—and their parents—who cared.

At the same time he couldn’t help but think that Madarame had been right: the pleasures of the flesh kept one from the pursuit of artistic perfection—and barring perfection, artistic pursuits in general. Yusuke had painted back then because it was all he had to do, it was the only way he knew of to pass the time, and now…

Now he had a job. School, responsibilities, friends. Painting was as far on the back burner as he could push it, and he missed it, missed the ease with which he could pour his heart onto a canvas, missed the way his hands felt steady and sure because painting hadn’t betrayed him, then. Painting hadn’t been the near death of him. Painting had been his escape.

Ryuji’s leg bumped into his. It was a small table, and Yusuke was tall, as everyone liked to point out. His legs were gangly and bumped the underside of every table he sat at; he had gotten used to folding them under his chair, instead, trading his own comfort for everyone else’s.

Ryuji had still reached out across all that space. His mother was still staring.

Yusuke tried to talk, but all that came out was a broken noise that could have been a sob or a word. He wasn’t even sure what he was trying to say—the usual platitudes Madarame had taught him, perhaps, or a litany of apologies—just that he was trying to say something, anything.

So he shut his mouth, grit his teeth, and closed his eyes.

Ryuji and his mother exchanged whispered words that Yusuke pretended he couldn’t hear. His tea was still warm, and the cup was still solid in his hands. Chamomile.

Someone took it from him. A calloused hand—Ryuji’s, it had to be—took his and pulled him out of the chair. Yusuke went where he was pulled, slumped over, eyes screwed shut. He could hear Ryuji’s mother in the background, dumping tea down the sink and putting the snacks away and washing the dishes, as her son led Yusuke to a couch and forced him to sit back down. It was a waste of perfectly good tea bags, in Yusuke’s opinion, and the couch was not comfortable. A lump dug into his backside.

“Told ya you need a break, dude,” Ryuji said, as soft as he was able. “Lucky us it’s summer vacation. Take off from work for a couple days and do nothing you don’t gotta, okay?”

That was easy for him to say. Ryuji and his mother were a team in this apartment; they shared the responsibilities and the consequences of not adhering to them. Yusuke was all on his own, now.

But, it did sound nice. Lazing about the apartment, painting whenever he felt he could. He would still have to drag Nakanohara out of the artistic space he had made for himself every so often to buy groceries and to go to work, but Yusuke wouldn’t have to worry about himself.

The TV clicked on. Ryuji hurriedly muted it, and patted his back in a way that was supposed to be comforting.

Yusuke didn’t have the heart to tell him he wasn’t much for physical comfort. Madarame had barely touched him once he was old enough to sit at a canvas on his own, and once the first students had come pouring in, even the occasional head pats and hair ruffles vanished.

He focused on the warmth, instead. Not the hand or the body but the warmth of it, and the smell: meat and teriyaki and some clean, unscented shampoo. It was like nights in the atelier all over again, crammed against the wall where the siding let in drafts, only to wake cold in the morning to everyone already at their easels. For the briefest of times he felt wanted. Needed.

Now Ryuji pulled him in close, let him slump over one shoulder.

Yusuke balled his hands into fists and pretended it didn’t mean the world to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you're ready for the longest summer vacation ever


	10. Summer Vacation, Wednesday

Sojiro couldn’t sleep.

There was yet another addition to his house, sleeping on the couch in the living room after nearly twenty minutes of debate with Futaba. She had wanted her friend to sleep in her room, but the place was so cramped they couldn’t roll out the guest futon. Then Futaba had wanted to sleep in the living room with her, and Sojiro was not moving furniture around when Futaba had a perfectly good bed to sleep in.

Too bad his own wasn’t doing the job at the moment. Nearly two in the morning, and he was tossing and turning and worrying.

He had a runaway kid in his house. He could probably be tried for kidnapping. The assholes at the courthouse would be all too glad to add another notch to the belt of justice, even if it was false. The law was coming down hard on kidnappers these days; Sojiro didn’t want to be one of them.

He sighed and got up. Hot tea might help him sleep, if he could brew it without waking anyone.

Was that how Futaba had felt, those first few years? Not knowing what might disturb him in the middle of the night, too afraid to wake him even on accident?

It had to be.

But this was his house, damn it. If he wanted tea why couldn’t he have any?

Kana was still in the living room, curled up under a pair of spare blankets Sojiro had dug out of the linen closet. Throws, for when it was cold out and his bones ached but he refused to turn the heat on, even if Futaba pouted at him for it.

And then he was in the kitchen, with the light over the sink on, hopefully dim enough that it didn’t wake her. He filled a kettle with water and set it on the stove, then dug through his pantry for tea bags, bringing each box over to the sink to read the label.

By the time he found which one he wanted, the kettle was beginning to shriek, and the floor in the hall was creaking.

Kana, with her hair mussed from sleep and in the pajamas she’d packed.

“Sorry,” he said, even though it was his damn house. “Want some?”

She nodded. Stood there while he poured out tea and dunked the bags in; waited while he sat down at the table, one hand worrying a loose thread on her sleeve.

Sojiro motioned to the other cup, and she sat down, blowing at the steam. She was a quiet girl, like Futaba. He could see how they could be friends.

Sojiro didn’t mind sitting there in silence, letting the heat of the tea warm him from the core. Kana sipped and made faces at her cup, disappointed it didn’t taste better. It was chamomile, and two in the morning; what did she expect?

He cleared his throat when his cup was nearly empty. “So,” he said, “just so we’re clear: I don’t mind you staying here over summer break. But when it’s over—”

What? What would she do when it was over? Go back to whatever shitstains she’d been running from? Go to the police, who would laugh her straight back to whatever shitstains she’d been running from?

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, voice hoarse from disuse. She’d barely talked earlier except to say thank you over and over again.

“Well,” he said, at a loss. What could she do? What could the law force him to do? What could the law force _her_ to do? He cleared his throat again. “Well, we’ll figure that out. Over break. How does that sound?”

She nodded. Took her cup to the sink and washed it out without him having to ask. Was she just a good girl, or was she afraid he’d yell and hit her if she didn’t?

God, the places his thoughts were going. It was all those news segments, the ones about kidnappers and abusers and rapists. Kids going missing. Kids running away and disappearing. Kids being found, but they were better off dead half the time.

Ren Amamiya was lucky. Sojiro didn’t know much about what was going on with him anymore, but he assumed being a disgraced prince floating out in space was better than the alternative of being hussled and hounded for drug money, or having his organs pulled from his still-breathing body to make some mafioso rich.

It all made Sojiro sick, the things people were willing to do to each other to gain money and power, the people they stepped on to get there nothing more than stepping stones on the path to success.

 _Success_. He almost wanted to laugh. What was success if you didn’t build it yourself, with your own two hands? What was success if gaining it meant you had to toss everyone around you under a bus? Who could you trust, with success like that?

Sojiro didn’t know, and he rather liked it like that.

He washed his cup and the kettle and went back to bed.

* * *

Shopping went exactly as Futaba had predicted it would.

Granted, sometime in the night she’d gone from fantasizing about every way this shopping trip could turn into an absolute nightmare to every way it could go wrong, which meant by the time she was waking up she was dreaming about being stuffed into a bear suit so she wouldn’t offend anyone with her less-than-developed body. She couldn’t have a disappointing rack if no one could see it, and she woke to her alarm with one hand squishing a boob, wishing that the age-old belief that massages made them bigger was true.

In her doujin it was probably the quickest way to get from friendly groping to full-on sex in two pages or less. In real life, if anyone ever attempted it, Futaba felt she’d scream and fling herself into the sun.

Being a girl was incredibly stupid. How could she joke about badly drawn porn with monkey-boy one day and turn into a blushing virgin the next?

Why did she even care about her boob size, anyway?

Oh, right: because every swimsuit Futaba actually liked had sagged in the chest, no matter how tight she had tied the strings. The empty cups bounced more than her boobs did, and if that wasn’t an affront to her flat-chestedness, Futaba wasn’t sure what else could be. They had gone to six different stores, stopped for lunch, and then gone to seven more, and it had taken Wakaba cajoling with a shopkeep to find one both she and Wakaba could agree wasn’t half-bad.

Futaba might not have liked the frills, but it was a swimsuit, and it fit. Even Takani-call-me-Ann liked it—but then again, she had a chest and could try on everything she laid eyes on.

Plus, she was a model. She probably had brand-name, designer swimsuits hanging in her closet.

Yeah, that was it. Takani-call-me-Ann was pretty and busty and successful with it, while Futaba was some Internet gargoyle, swooping in and cackling with glee whenever one of her plans went just right, like how she’d tricked the tracker on Kana’s phone to think it was somewhere in Sapporo and not in the middle of Tokyo.

It definitely wasn’t because Takani was talking with Wakaba over ice cream in fluent English, earning them both stares as Takani’s fudgesicle melted all over her hands, and it definitely wasn’t because Wakaba actually looked happy to be talking to her, instead of with her own daughter.

No, Futaba wasn’t jealous. She had Kana right next to her, who had opted for a cup of ice cream and was staring at her little wooden spoon as it melted. Kana, who had barely said a word the whole time.

“You okay?” Futaba asked her. Over Takani’s sudden laughter, it sounded rather pitiful.

Kana nodded, but then bit her lip. She stared out at the crowd going by as if they all might turn into sharks in an instant and rip her into bloody pieces. “Are you sure they won’t find me?”

“Not unless you want them to,” Futaba assured her. Kana nodded again, and that was that.

Okay. Fine.

Futaba was used to playing the waiting game. With every successful hack came the inevitable downtime: what to do while the files were copied and compressed and saved to her specialized storage. Usually, Futaba gamed or watched anime.

She got the feeling Kana wouldn’t enjoy that, though. Kana was a normal girl. She probably thought games were for boys, and that Futaba should take up knitting as a hobby.

Ugh.

Futaba was used to the waiting game. She was also used to having everything she wanted to know stored in her computer to be perused at her own leisure, not waiting for someone to open up and talk to her about it. The sooner Kana talked, the sooner Futaba could _do_ something about it.

She hated not acting, not doing everything she could do bring some lowlife to justice. Justice as Medjed, hacker supreme, was easy. Justice as Futaba Isshiki, high school nobody, was much, much harder.

Kana stirred her ice cream. Futaba’s phone went off with its usual alarm—seven o’clock. Medicine time.

Except she hadn’t thought to bring any. Didn’t think it would take so long to find a swimsuit. Terror crept into her as she stared at her phone; this would be the first day she’d missed taking it. She’d been so good, too, waking up earlier than she wanted to eat real food and take her medicine. Every day, even on the weekend when she should have been sleeping like every other teenager in the world.

“Is it that late already?” Wakaba asked, and looked at her watch.

“Mom,” Futaba didn’t whimper.

“It’ll be okay, Futaba,” Wakaba said, except it wasn’t. The medicine took an hour to kick in. It would take an hour to get home and then Futaba could take it and sit in a corner hoping the voices didn’t come back.

Takani took her ice cream and trashed it. There was a worried tilt to her brow, but she pulled Futaba up and let Wakaba take her, corralling Kana and the shopping bags in the crook of her elbow.

Oh, that was it: Takani was normal. Takani didn’t have to take medicine to make the voices in her head go away. Takani didn’t have to worry that the voices would come back, telling her she was worthless and useless and a waste of space.

“Is Isshiki okay?” Kana asked.

“Yeah!” Takani answered, a bit too brightly for someone who had no idea what was going on. “But it’s pretty late. She must be hungry. You’re hungry, too, right?”

Futaba couldn’t tell if Kana was nodding or not, and decided it didn’t matter. She’d forgotten to bring her medicine with her. She didn’t think shopping for a swimsuit would be an all-day, every-inch-of-Tokyo affair. She’d thought they’d be home by noon at the latest.

She should have known.

This time she did whimper.

Forget life as a girl; life, in general, sucked. Life on pills sucked. Life with voices in her head telling her she was better off dead sucked. Why couldn’t her hallucinations be happier, more upbeat? Why couldn’t they tell her nice things about herself?

“Do you have your pass, Futaba?”

She dragged out her phone, fumbled with the screen until it unlocked, and swiped to her train pass. Takani bought Kana a ticket, and they sat huddled together in the women’s car, Takani and her long, long hair standing over them like a barrier.

Futaba looked up at her. The worried look on her face didn’t melt away completely, but she did smile, like she knew Futaba was going through something and wanted to make it a little better without lying completely. Kana was even there, right beside Futaba, their sides pressed together so that Futaba could feel her breathing. Kana’s hand hooked in her shirt like it was her own, and Wakaba had one of Futaba’s hands between hers.

Futaba shut her eyes and willed the world to stop spinning for a moment. Just a moment, a second; that was all she asked. But she could also feel her meds wearing off; every stop was accompanied by a fresh squeal of delight from some hidden, awful thing inside her head. It crowed victory; when Futaba dared a look at something other than the inside of her eyelids, Wakaba’s face was there over Takani’s knee. It sneered at her.

“Poor Futaba,” it said. “Ran out of medicine? Dear, you should know better than to think you can escape me.”

“Mom,” Futaba said.

“You’re going to be fine, Futaba,” Wakaba said. The real one, not the fake glaring from the shadows of a kneecap. The real one, the one that mattered more than some fake.

Wakaba’s hand ran through her hair. This was all some bad dream. There was no way the voices could be back so soon—so _easily_ , as if Futaba hadn’t banished them to the far corners of her mind. It wasn’t fair. They were nowhere near Yongen or Sojiro’s dinners or her medicine.

It wasn’t fair.

“Oh, Futaba,” Kana crooned, in a voice that mirrored the fakes Wakaba’s. “Life’s not fair. Do you think I enjoy being my parent’s cash cow? _Your_ mom hasn’t urged you to spread your legs a little wider for the camera while your dad tries to hide his boner. You’ve got it _easy_.”

“Hey, Futaba,” Takani said, and rushed on without any extra input. “You know, I’m super excited for the beach trip. I know I keep saying it, but thanks so much for letting me and Shiho come, too. She’ll love meeting you.”

There, like that. Why couldn’t her subconscious tell her nice things like that?

“She’s a jock,” Futaba grit out, “so I doubt that.”

“So? We’re friends with Yusuke, and he’s not a jock.”

No, but Inari was a boy and stupidly tall. Futaba wouldn’t be surprised if he got mistaken for a beanpole on a regular basis, and he could probably keep up with monkey-boy in a race, if he didn’t get distracted by the asymmetry of the crowd and call it off to fix it.

Ugh, she could see it, too. Anyone who obsessed over millimeters would totally call off a race to make the crowd more pleasing to the eye as he ran by it.

“Anyway,” Takani went on, “what are you looking forward to? I want to ride on one of those banana boats! They look like so much fun!”

They looked ridiculous. Futaba imagined Inari in one, his legs folded up to his chin to fit, and laughed. Takani looked like she wanted to know what was so funny, so she shared it.

Takani broke into another smile, and agreed.

That was how Futaba managed to get home: with Takani almost right in her face, telling her stupid jokes that weren’t very funny but Futaba laughed at anyway. Her stomach hurt when they finally arrived, and the first thing Wakaba did was find her medicine.

Futaba checked the color—blue—and washed it down with water. Her hands stopped shaking. Her heart rate started to fall.

Takani put their shopping bags down in the hall and excused herself. She had a videochat with her friend scheduled, and she didn’t want to be late, and she was looking forward to Friday.

Futaba waved her off and stuffed more bread in her mouth. Until Wakaba decided on what to make, if anything at all, it would have to do. This left Kana standing in the kitchen entrance, staring.

“What?” Futaba asked.

Kana shook her head, stopped, then said, “I didn’t know you took medicine, Isshiki.”

“Well, I do,” Futaba said, and tore her bread slice into chunks. Wakaba took the rest away, said she’d be right back, and was out the door.

If Futaba was guessing right, she was going for curry from Leblanc. Something quick and easy and, most importantly, free, after all the money they’d spent on a swimsuit and half-eaten ice cream.

“Do they know?” Kana asked. Futaba could guess what she was talking about; she turned away to focus on shredding her bread chunks and willed the world to make that specter of Sojiro in the corner, glowering at her, go away.

She wasn’t going to spontaneously combust or disappear for being a little late with her medicine. This was stress talking, feeding her all the images she never wanted to see again. “I promised I wouldn’t,” she said, more than a little insulted. “Do you think I’d lie?”

“I don’t know,” Kana said. “I barely know you at all.”

Fair. Futaba could give her that. “Well, I didn’t, okay? And you’re welcome for the tracker, by the way. I can make your phone disappear tonight, if you want me to.”

“Then do it.” She walked over to the table, sat her phone down a bit too harshly, and collapsed into a chair. “Make me disappear, Isshiki. I won’t go back there.”

“How come?”

It was a stupid question. There was only one reason that Kana would have chosen now, of all times, to run away: her parents must have gotten more aggressive, wanted her to do more and wear less so the pictures could sell for more. They’d been making bank off their daughter for years; why would that change now?

“You know about the photos,” Kana said. “I still can’t believe that you read that page in an instant, but you did, so you know. And, well—the profile they set up for me says I turn twenty this month. I’m of age, now, at least on the ‘net where it matters, right? So they want me to do porn shots.”

“Called it,” Futaba said. “Also, you’ve got shit parents.” Kana frowned at her. “Really, negative five on the parenting skills. Anyone could see that was where this was going, okay? Cute leads to risque leads to porn. Are you sure all you want is to disappear, though?”

“What else can I do? If I don’t disappear, they’ll find me and take me back there. They were already talking about pulling me out of school because it costs too much. I don’t want to be locked up in that house forever, Isshiki! I don’t! I’m not like you!”

Futaba mashed her bread chunks. It was easier than smacking Kana, and she could pretend the tabletop was her keyboard. It wasn’t as if she had wanted to feel like a prisoner inside her own house, inside her own room, inside her own head. That was half the reason Medjed existed: it was an escape, a way for Futaba to look at the world as if she belonged in it, instead of being on the outside looking in.

Who was she kidding? She’d always been like this, and it was all the fault of girls like Kana and women like her mom. Futaba was too weird to be one of them, and too weak to be independent, so she stayed home where she wouldn’t have to hear it.

“Disappearing’s not much different,” Futaba told her. “You pick a hole and you hide in it and hope nobody you want to find you finds you. You don’t leave that hole, because if you do, then you won’t be _gone_ anymore. Got it?”

“What other choice do I have?” Kana cried.

“You make them disappear instead. Some of your parent’s customers are pretty powerful people. Leak your real age and they’ll toss ‘em under a bus faster than you can blink, especially the ones who’ve been buying pictures since you were in middle school. And if they don’t, I’m sure an anonymous police report will do the trick, too.”

“You want my _parents_ to get _arrested_?”

“Are they your parents or your managers?” Futaba fired back. “Do you want to live in a hole or out in the open air, Kana?”

“Don’t call me that!” Kana spits. “You—you don’t get to call me that, Isshiki!”

This must have been how Nishima felt, when monkey-boy started using his given name out of the blue, except in reverse. Futaba had always been Futaba because her mom was the one who was Isshiki. Futaba had gotten used to being called Futaba by anyone who met her because she insisted on it, and now Kana was here, treating her mom’s name like it was the only thing that defined Futaba; not her photographic memory or her pressing need for medicine or her hacking skills but Isshiki, the genius, the workaholic, the woman who never came home even to feed her own daughter.

Nishima hadn’t known what to say when monkey-boy called him Yuuki. Futaba didn’t know what to say now, with Kana shoving them back to not-quite-friends. Classmates was all they were and all they ever would be and Kana was making sure she knew that, because Futaba was too much of a freak to befriend.

“Decide,” she forced out through a throat that didn’t want to work. She sounded like she was about to cry. She felt like it, too. “Pick one and go with it. I’m giving you time before they start looking, but once they start no one is going to believe you. You’re going to be whatever daughter they spin you as, and it’s not going to go away just because you want it to.”

“What does _that_ mean?”

But Futaba didn’t answer. She retreated to her room, only opening the door for the curry her mom set out in front much, much later.

* * *

The truth was that Ryuji was right: Yusuke needed a break.

He was relieved that Hanasaki let him take off for summer break— _“I have others I can call in if I need the help, so get some rest and come back refreshed, okay?”_ —and it took him a while to realize it was because Madarame would never have let him do the same. Madarame, despite his long, frequent hiatuses from creation, would never have let one of his precious students do anything as needful as take a break. If they took a break there was every chance they would use the time to rethink their entire lives, go back to their estranged families, and leave him. If they took a break, it meant they weren’t contributing anymore.

Yusuke was tired of contributing. Akira, at least, was unaware that it had been days since Yusuke’s last use of the app. Everyone else, however, kept texting him.

Such as now, when his phone began to buzz in the middle of a game with Togo. Muffled at the bottom of his bag, it almost went unnoticed.

“Did you have plans?” Togo asked, placing a piece down. He studied the board; there wasn’t much left he could do, but it wasn’t his style to give in until his last piece was taken.

“I may have worried a friend of mine,” Yusuke confessed, “by crying rather uncontrollably in his apartment and all over his shirt while we watched terrible television.”

Togo hummed. “I see,” she said.

He made his move. She made hers without much hesitation or forethought.

It felt terribly unfair.

“I suppose it would be rude of me to ask why you were crying all over your friend, wouldn’t it?” she asked.

“It would.” Or, he thought so. Admitting that he was incredibly overwhelmed by his responsibilities was difficult enough the first time, and that was only when he was able to talk about Nakanohara and painting and his job. It didn’t include Akira. “But I suppose it isn’t new to other young adults you’ll be speaking to. Adulthood is rather trying, you see.”

She nodded. “So everyone tells me. I’m inclined to believe it, if only because I’ve had to claw my way back up the ranks with nothing and no one to help me, aside from anyone here who wants to play against me. Is it something like that, Kitagawa?”

“Something like that, yes,” he said. The clack of their pieces in the silence of the church should have felt like a slap to the face of every worshiper inside; instead they smiled and nodded their heads in brief bows of acknowledgment and bent their heads in prayer and gave him and Togo candies, some days. Not even Father John seemed to mind their conversations, as long as they didn’t get too loud and obstructive.

Togo hummed, and nodded. She was probably thinking it had to do with painting. That wasn’t necessarily false—trying to learn to love painting again was likely as difficult as re-earning each rank she had lost to her own pride—but it wasn’t necessarily true, either.

Painting was difficult, yes, but he had cried over Ryuji’s shoulder about that. He had found ways to make it easier to do, ways to tire his hands out so they didn’t shake so much whenever he picked up a brush. He was going to pull Nakanohara aside Saturday evening to talk to him about the groceries and chores. He was trying, and each promise he made himself felt as if part of a burden had been lifted from his shoulders.

The only thing left was Akira.

Togo slammed another piece on the board. Yusuke studied it; his king was taken, the last and final piece surrendered. “I suppose you win, yet again,” he said.

“Is that how you ask for another game?” she asked, lips curling into a smile.

“Only if I can trouble you with a certain… problem I can’t bring up to anyone else,” he said.

“It sounds like you need a doctor, Kitagawa.”

She set up the pieces anyway. He arranged his into the neat, orderly rows she had shown him and bowed over the board.

“It’s not a problem like that,” he said, as he moved his first piece. Togo always let him go first. If she wasn’t so good, he would find it infuriating. “It’s… well, it’s about a friend of a friend.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, it is.” He matched her move with another. It wasn’t good, that he was drawn into her pace like this so early on in the game, but he was rather tired of thinking over every move. If he gave it no more thought than he would a stroke of his pencil, perhaps he would do better. “A friend of mine and his lover fought a few months ago.”

“Over what?”

What had Yuuki said? That Akira was sick? Or had that been Ryuji, and Yusuke had helped perpetuate the lie? “A surgery,” he said. “His love was sick and needed it, but would have needed to recover where my friend can’t reach him. Recently, his love has been in contact—not with him but with me.”

Togo’s gaze sharpened. Her hand with a piece held in its grip stopped in midair.

A chill went down his spine. Yusuke laughed in the face of it. “I would never encourage anyone to cheat, Togo, much less exhibit such behavior myself. How crass of you.”

“Then why would this love talk to you, Kitagawa?”

“Their fight ended poorly,” Yusuke explained, remembering Akira’s tear-filled face. His pleas and cries and the defeat in his eyes before he closed them and cut the connection. How Yuuki had drawn them all in close and cried and cried for hours afterward, over board games and snacks. “I’ve always found that it’s hard to reconcile after a fight as big as theirs. The problem I’ve had is that his love is acting as if my friend doesn’t exist, when before he was such a large part of their world.”

“Then it’s simple, isn’t it, Kitagawa?” The sharp clack of another piece. Togo’s gaze was fierce, determined, as she took in the board. Yusuke wondered if that was how he had looked at paintings, once: as if he could force his will upon them with a single stroke. “You have to make them talk about it. Why won’t they admit to having a boyfriend? Was the fight that awful? Do they know that you’re their boyfriend’s friend, and that you’re conflicted on telling one or the other that you’re in contact?”

She paused. “You—you are, aren’t you? Conflicted, I mean.”

“Partially,” he said, and moved another piece. “It was an ugly fight, Togo, and the recovery process isn’t going as seamlessly as we had hoped it would. I—I suppose my concern is that his love fears that he can’t speak of it, out of some fear of what might happen if he does. He may lose all of his support there.”

“So it’s a boy,” Togo said softly to herself. Then, louder, after a sigh, “I’m afraid I don’t know. This sounds very convoluted, Kitagawa. Are you telling me the truth?”

Most of it, he wanted to say. Excluding the parts about colony ships, other dimensions, and hostile fairies, that was nearly what Akira was going through: recovering what he had lost to an ill-timed attack from Goro five-thousand years before. Pushing through despite all of his fear and anger and irritation to reach the end goal of saving a planet of kidnappers and returning home.

“The board tells me you are,” she said, and tapped it. He didn’t know what she saw there among the pieces. It looked like the same shogi board as always, and the same pieces.

“It’s the simplest way I can put it, then,” he said. He had next to no moves, but still forced one forward.

“You’re playing with half an army, Kitagawa. Unless you lay all your men out one by one, you’ll never get anywhere.”

“Let’s forget I mentioned it, then, please.”

“Oh, perhaps,” she said, with another smile. A final clack served its verdict: he had lost, yet again. “I suppose I could, on one condition.”

He bristled. Of course, a catch. “And that would be?”

It was her turn to sigh. She began packing up the pieces, and he helped her drop each one into the bag. “I keep being invited to mixers. I’ve said I’m not interested, but they keep asking. I had to strike a deal with the organizer: if I go to one, just one, he’ll stop asking me to go. I’ll admit it sounds dubious, but he’s gotten annoying, and I’m willing to do anything to have my peaceful lunches back.”

“You want me to go with you,” Yusuke guessed.

“I do,” she said.

He sucked in a breath. How to explain that he didn’t want to pretend to be her boyfriend, even for a night? How to explain that, despite his threat to Ryuji, he never wanted to put anyone through that? Lies begat lies, after all. They never stopped at just one.

“Togo,” he said, as she slid the board and the bag of pieces away, “you—you are lovely. Anyone with eyes can see that. Surely there’s someone else you can have pretend to be your lover for an evening—”

“Lover? When did I say that?”

“Well, how else are you getting out of it?”

“I want you there as moral support, Kitagawa,” she said. Her expressions were small, almost miniscule. Her pout came about with as much effort as her smiles. “Be someone I can turn to to talk about shogi when I’m becoming overwhelmed. I’d never agree to go if there wasn’t a familiar face in the crowd.”

“I—oh,” he said. “You only want me there as a—as a friend.”

“I do.”

“I—I see,” he said. He had to look away for a moment. Togo was not asking him to pretend to date her; Togo was asking him to keep her company as she navigated unfamiliar territory.

“Unless you’d like to explain yourself further, of course,” she said.

“I don’t,” he said, then sighed. “I’ll do it, then. I’ll take your advice under consideration, and I’m sorry to have troubled you with it.”

“Don’t be.” When she stood, he followed, gathering up his bag and giving thanks to Father John for letting them use his church once again. When they were outside in the muggy heat of a Tokyo night, she added, “I had no idea you worried over such things. You feel a bit more human, now, I think.”

“Am I supposed to say the same to you? That you feel more human to me, now that I know you worry over social events and are not a shogi-playing machine?”

Togo looked over her shoulder. She was smiling again, as if everything he said was amusing. “I never said I thought you were an art-making machine. It’s only that the Kitagawa I remember wouldn’t have worried over the love lives of his friends like this. Wouldn’t the easiest solution be to let your friend have a turn talking to his love again? Or you could act as a proxy, a middleman…”

His face must have betrayed what he was feeling: that that absolutely, positively was _not_ a solution he could follow through with. It would be easy to, yes, but Yusuke and Yuuki were already spending more time apart than Yusuke wanted. To have even their few moments of comraderie stolen because of Akira, _again_ …

“I don’t want that,” he wound up whispering to her, as she stared on, startled. “Even if it means I’m selfish, Togo, I don’t want that.”

Togo’s face softened. It was still the same lovely face that so many of his classmates had wanted to sketch, paint, or photograph, but Yusuke shut his eyes on it, the darkness summoning memories of Yuuki, and Akira. The heat pushed its way down into his very lungs, and he thought of a lost planet turned into nothing but space and energy—absence and heat—a void, and the dense heart of love that Yuuki had so dutifully fed it. Yusuke didn’t want that other world to use Yuuki anymore. Yusuke didn’t want that other world to lay claim to yet another innocent soul.

And if it turned out that Akira knew—if it turned out that Akira was complicit in it all, after all this time and after all of Yuuki’s love for him—what then?

What could Yusuke do then?

“Kitagawa,” Togo called, somehow softer than the breeze rushing past them. She was looking at him again, this time as if she truly realized he was as human as the rest.

Of course he was. If it was for the love of his life, Yusuke would let whole worlds burn into ash and dust, until they were nothing but tales told at the bedsides of children.

(Once upon a time, a very selfish people stole away a very kind, precious boy—)

“I think I’m rather tired,” he said, instead of answering the questions in her expression. He was not alright. He did not want to explain. He wanted nothing more than to go home, crawl into bed, and wish to whatever god would listen that Ren Amamiya had never gone missing.

Luckily, Togo didn’t press. They walked to the station, said their goodbyes, and parted ways.

* * *

The good thing about visiting Kaoru was that he didn’t like to chatter. Shinya would hand over his phone, make absolutely certain that under no uncertain terms was Kaoru to do any of the fighting, and let him have his way figuring out the plot and making weird items that made Pink Girl stronger. Shinya hated anything to do with the crafting system, since it involved terrible dancing, terrible singing, and long-ass conversations afterwards.

He just wanted to make Pink Girl stronger. Was that too much to ask?

Plus, when Kaoru had his phone, Shinya got to browse through the catalogs his dad left lying around their apartment. Model guns and weapons, _real_ guns and weapons, camo gear and gloves and combat boots. Whole journals about the proper way to paint a model involving lots of sandpaper; Shinya tended to skip those, because really, who cared about painting the things?

But so far all of his snooping hadn’t turned up any works-in-progress. Kaoru’s dad apparently didn’t work on his models at home, and he didn’t bring any old, out-of-season stock home, either.

Shinya felt gipped. He flopped onto Kaoru’s bed and groaned.

“I told you so,” Kaoru quipped from his desk, Shinya’s phone on a stupid-looking stand in front of him.

“Shut up,” Shinya muttered. “Just ‘cause you don’t know about it doesn’t mean he doesn’t, okay?”

“But now you know he doesn’t,” Kaoru said, and turned away from the screen, “which means I was right, so I told you so.”

“Are you really in high school?”

“Yes,” Kaoru said. “What’s your point?”

“I thought high-schoolers were supposed to be cool,” Shinya told him. Naturally not everyone could be owner-of-a-model-gun-shop cool, but Kaoru was the son of an owner of a model gun shop. Shouldn’t some of his coolness have rubbed off on him?

Kaoru only shrugged, but as he turned back to Shinya’s phone Shinya could see how troubled he was.

Shinya, like every other bored kid in the world, jumped on the chance. “What? Worried ‘cause you’re not as cool as your dad?”

“No one’s as cool as my dad,” Kaoru said. His tone was soft, but threatening, like he was daring Shinya to push him. “Nobody, got it? Nobody.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Shinya said, and buried his face into Kaoru’s pillow, letting the fight drain out of him. It was just his luck, too, to be stuck here until Kaoru was done with his phone and his mom was home so he could go back without having her stare at him for staying home all day.

She didn’t like it when he stayed for _too long_. She didn’t like it when he stayed for _too little_. At this point Shinya didn’t want to ask what _too long_ and _too little_ actually meant. Had she expected him to join a school club or something? Make friends he could hang out and kill time with far away from her perfect, clean little apartment?

Parents were dumb. Adults, in general, were dumb. His gym teacher kept coming after him to cut his hair, and Shinya was growing it out longer and not tying it back just to spite the guy.

Asshole.

But because he was an asshole, it meant Shinya got the little victories over the day: asshole gym teacher could blow up at him two or three times a day, and the redder his face got, the more pride Shinya felt. Only losers bawled over stupid shit like haircuts and accessories, and that gym teacher was a loser and proved it nearly every day. None of the other teachers got on him about his hair; maybe they were realizing it would be wasted effort.

Maybe they already had, and asshole gym teacher knew he was fighting a losing battle.

Shinya frowned at the thought. Losers were meant to give up. Losing meant you couldn’t fight anymore, that you had nothing left to fight for. Eventually you’d either get good enough to win or you’d annoy the living hell out of your opponent. Shinya couldn’t stand those types of guys at the arcade—the ones who came in, saw how short he was or his uniform, and thought they’d have an easy match. They always lost, and they always tried to find some excuse for losing, and then they always cried for a rematch.

Like those losers Shinya used to gamble with at the beginning of the year. They lost and lost—but it was never their fault, it was always Shinya’s, and when they couldn’t win a simple card game they ganged up on him and forced him to lose, instead.

Assholes.

“Hey,” Kaoru said, interrupting a fantasy where Shinya punted them all off the climbing rock and right onto the ridiculously tall head of his would-be savior. He grunted in acknowledgment. “You know, I’ve been thinking—I think I’ve seen Ion’s face before. Outside of the game, I mean.”

“So?”

“Well, wouldn’t it bother you? That you were seeing a face you knew should be familiar, but you can’t recall where you saw it?”

“Uh, no,” Shinya said. “If I did I’d never get to playing Gun About. Do you know how many people challenge me when I’m there? They get one match a day and that’s it. I don’t bother to remember their faces.”

Kaoru laughed. “You must be different, then. It’s driving me nuts. And Goro’s—I think I’ve seen his before, too. He said he’s trying to get home. Do you think he’s lost?”

“How should I know?” And why should he care? Would it get him farther in the game, somehow, to care about lost kids? “If he’s lost it’s his own fault, anyway. Should’ve stayed with his mom and not wandered off.”

“Right, yeah,” Kaoru said, already being sucked back into the game. But only half his mind was on it; the other reached for his laptop, tucked away into a corner of his desk.

He looked serious, and even if his haircut was dorky and his glasses gave him a villainous glare—Shinya shuddered to even think it, but he looked kind of cool. Kind of, behind the roundness of his cheeks and the collar of his polo shirt.

“Hey,” Shinya said, as Kaoru flipped open his laptop and punched in the password with one hand. “What’re your plans for summer break, anyway? Is it really just to sit around with me and play this stupid game?”

Kaoru hummed in response, thinking it over. “Not sure,” he finally said. “Dad and I might go see the fireworks, and I’ve got homework, too.”

“That’s it?” Shinya couldn’t believe this. A high-schooler with no summer plans? What was he, thirty?

Then again, Shinya didn’t exactly have plans, either. Could he really complain?

“Yeah, pretty much,” Kaoru said, nonchalant. Like he did this kind of boring thing every year.

“Don’t you have friends?”

Kaoru turned, brows raised. “Are you really going there, Mr. Hangs-Out-in-an-Airsoft-Shop-Alone?”

Shinya glared. He _had_ asked for it, after all, but it stung. Middle school, he and his mom had hoped, would be a turning point for him. It wasn’t, because all of his old bullies had followed him and spread their nasty rumors and pretended they were victims. Losers, instead of perpetrators.

But Kaoru sighed. “You’re my friend. If you want to do something other than hang out here, we can. Just nothing expensive, okay?”

“I’ll probably spend most of my money playing Gun About, anyway.” In other words: no, Shinya didn’t want to go around doing gross friend shit with a high-schooler.

Kaoru didn’t even blink. He turned back to his laptop screen. “Why _do_ you play so much Gun About?”

“Because it’s fun,” Shinya said. Did he even have to ask? “Why do you sit around here, when you could be helping your dad in his super-cool shop?”

“Because he doesn’t want me there,” Kaoru said, his voice going ice-cold. Shinya felt a shiver work its way down his spine; Kaoru’s dad was a badass and there was no telling how much of it Kaoru had inherited. He probably knew ten ways to kill Shinya with one hand.

Then again, it was Kaoru, who wore polo shirts in the summer. His glasses fogged up whenever they entered a store or a building, and he always wiped them off on his shirt while Shinya was forced to wait. He liked the plot of this weird app game and had a weird birthmark behind his left ear.

And when he didn’t want to talk about something, he went stony. He’d clam up and try to avoid the subject instead of telling Shinya to back off, and as his shoulders tried to kiss his ears Shinya realized that maybe Kaoru had the same problem with his dad that Shinya had with his mom: both had places they didn’t want their kids to be, and did and said whatever it took to keep them out.

Adults were shit.

Shinya clicked his tongue and buried his face in the pillow again. His stomach complained. “I’m hungry. Do you expect me to stay for dinner, too?”

“Do you want to?”

Shinya thought about his mom’s work schedule, up on the fridge in neat rows. She always worked late so she could see him off in the morning, and her next day off was Sunday. No one would be home. There would be food in the fridge for him to eat, but would he want more dry leftovers that never cooked right in the microwave?

Uh, no.

“Your treat,” Shinya said.

“This is my house,” Kaoru said, and Shinya kicked at the bedding at his amusement. “I’m not buying you anything.”

“Jerk,” he muttered.

“We can make something!” Kaoru protested. “There’s eggs in the fridge. We can have omelet rice; that’s plenty easy to make.”

“It’s _your_ kitchen,” Shinya said.

“Is that how you say you’re only good for playing Gun About?”

Shinya sighed, preparing to explain the complexity of Gun About rankings—but stopped.

He knew more about Gun About rankings than he did about cooking. He knew more about Gun About rankings than he did about what his mom did for a living to give him an allowance that let him _play_ Gun About. He knew more about Gun About rankings than he did about his mobile app game.

 _Kaoru_ knew more about his mobile app game than he did. Kaoru had, when he called, mentioned getting done the last of the laundry and Shinya was free to come over today, Kaoru had time if he wanted to visit—

“Fuck you,” he spat.

“Huh?”

“Fuck you!” He sat up, head spinning. Kaoru’s neat bedspread was being mangled by his knees and what did he care, really? Did he even have to care? “Don’t look down on me just because I’m younger than you, got it?”

Kaoru, sitting surprised at his desk, only blinked. “I—okay,” he said.

“I could cook if I wanted to!”

“Okay,” Kaoru said.

“That doesn’t mean I’ll cook with you, though! I’m a guest, aren’t I? I’m not supposed to help!”

“Well, no, I just meant—”

“That I’m some kind of loser who doesn’t know how to cook,” Shinya finished for him. It had to be the truth, otherwise Kaoru wouldn’t have said it, right?

And what kind of loser didn’t know how to cook?

(Shinya, that’s who. His mom made everything and all he ever had to do was heat it back up in the microwave, but like hell was he going to tell Kaoru that.)

“I don’t think a lot of seventh graders know how to cook, Shinya,” Kaoru said, but the calm, placid tone just pissed him off more. Kaoru was looking down on him. Kaoru, who Shinya had deigned to entrust his phone and the mobile game app to, was nothing more than another shitty adult who used his position as _older_ and _wiser_ to boss kids like Shinya around.

Fuck that, and fuck staying here any longer.

“I’m leaving,” he said, and thrust his hand out for his phone.

“Uh, okay,” Kaoru said, and didn’t have time to say anything more. Once his phone was in his hands, Shinya bolted.

It wasn’t running away, it was strategic retreat—even if his bone-dry dinner turned out too salty for his liking. In the safety of his empty apartment, no one was around to hear him bang on the table and yell obscenities at the walls. No one was around to watch him throw the plates to the floor, hoping the crash would satisfy whatever thing was burning a hole through his insides.

No one was around to witness him crumple among the mess of shattered dishes and wonder if he was the loser, after all.

* * *

Shinya didn’t know what time it was when his mom finally came home. He did know that he had dozed, on and off, on the floor, his cheek pressing into porcelain shards that stuck as the blood dried.

They itched. He couldn’t find the energy to move them, didn’t want to move them at all.

But his mom shrieked, and screamed, and pushed the shards out of his cheek. “What happened, Shinya?” she asked, over and over, like a broken record. “Did someone do this to you? Tell me! Answer me!”

He felt cuts on his knees, his arms, his hands. Drying, sticky blood that was smeared all over her floor was stuck all over him, too.

“I lost,” he said. It was the only explanation. He lost, which meant he hadn’t won, which meant she didn’t—shouldn’t—care.

“So someone _was_ here! Tell me, Shinya; who was it? If it was one of those hooligans from school again, tell me! We can get them expelled for this!”

He thought of his classmates at the park. The way no one around them had questioned what they were doing, at all, because they were _classmates_ and Shinya was _sick_. Expelling them wouldn’t make the problem go away, it would just give them time to follow him around and do what they wanted where no one could hear.

… There was blood in his hair. His mom ran her fingers through the clotted mess, and he wondered how anyone could have so much blood in them. He didn’t even feel woozy, just tired. Expended.

Defeated.

“Nobody was here, Mom,” he said, and brushed her hand away. Losers didn’t deserve comfort; winners were the ones who deserved the praise and the accolades and the esteem. Losers didn’t get anything. Losers just got taken from.

“What do you mean, no one was here, Shinya?” She grabbed him, pulled him back to the mess on the floor. Shards dug into his socks; soy sauce, wet underneath a dry crust, soaked in. “If no one was here, who made this mess?”

“I did,” Shinya said.

“You did,” she repeated. Her grip got tighter as her voice became colder. “And why, exactly, did you make a mess you knew I’d have to clean up?”

“I can clean it up,” he said. That was what losers did, after all: they cleaned up messes, their own and everyone else’s.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” his mom spat. “This is—it’s dangerous, Shinya! You could get hurt worse! Do you think I want you to get hurt? Do you think I’m that kind of mother?”

“No,” he said, “but it’s—”

“But _nothing_!” This time she hauled him over to the bathroom, digging around under the sink until she found a first aid kit. He said nothing as she pulled the shards off his face and out of his socks, swiped antibiotic pads across every inch of exposed skin—and even under the hem of his shorts, _just in case_ —and sprayed that new liquid bandage across every cut and scrape.

Then she hugged him. He didn’t know what to do when she did, so he sat stock-still on the lid of the toilet, waiting it out as she said her _I love you_ s and _I’m sorry_ s and _Everything will be alright_ s.

She walked him back to his room, promised that she would find out what was really going on, and shut the door behind her.

Shinya collapsed into his bed—neatly made, even though he hadn’t bothered to make it this morning before he left—and dragged his phone off the nightstand.

Mindless grinding with Pink Girl didn’t make him feel better, but he could at least blame the tears burning in his eyes on the bright light in the dark, dark room.


	11. Summer Vacation, Thursday

Yuuki was pretty sure Futaba was mad at him.

Despite his apologies and the audio file of the new video he’d sent her as proof, he hadn’t gotten anything back. She was probably busy with her friend. She was definitely busy with her friend. She didn’t need him anymore now that her dear old classmate was around to be friends with.

He sounded pathetic. Futaba could have other friends other than him; what was he getting so worked up over?

His phone buzzed. Yuuki jumped, nearly sending it straight to the floor, and when it was safe in his hands again—and his downstairs neighbor was thumping the ceiling, as if he had intentionally ruined their afternoon by being noisy—he checked the screen.

Yamada, asking about the mixer again.

Yuuki groaned. Ever since that day in the library, Yamada had been on his case about mixers. Yamada with his dimples and the mole by his eye and the casual brushes of his arm or his hand on Yuuki’s. Yuuki didn’t know what to think about Yamada—

No, actually, he did. Yamada scared him. Yuuki didn’t know much about mixers but an average guy like him didn’t belong at one, and Yamada had to know that, but he was still asking, still pushing, still pressing for an answer, even though he had to know by now that his incessant questions just made Yuuki queasy.

At least with Kamoshida and his mother Yuuki knew what to look for. The tensing of her shoulders before she began to shout; the squaring of his hips before he served a ball straight over the net and into Yuuki’s face. He didn’t have to deal with Kamoshida or his mother anymore, but Yamada was still there. They were going to be in the same class for another month or two.

A month or two felt so long. It would be so short—but not if Yuuki was a nervous wreck the whole time. Not if he spent every waking moment on pins and needles, wondering when Yamada would show his true colors.

Another buzz. Yamada, _again_ , assuring him that there wouldn’t be any alcohol there, it was under twenty only, _and_ he’d chosen a venue that absolutely would not serve them booze.

“But why?” Yuuki asked the phone as its screen went dark. Why him? Why try so hard for him? The only person who had tried this hard to get him out of his apartment was Ryuji, and that was only after that awful week last year, after Yuuki had grudgingly made peace with it.

But Yamada had nothing like that. Yamada wasn’t an old classmate forced to watch another be secretive as shit, Yamada hadn’t endured Kamoshida, Yamada had nothing to tie him to Yuuki besides their shared single class, and no reason to be doing this.

Well, no reason that Yuuki wanted to entertain. Good Samaritans who insisted they were doing it because they worried about him only ever asked once. Good friends like Ryuji dropped it when he explained why, because that was all they needed to hear.

But Yamada didn’t stop. Yuuki had turned down his second and third invitations because of homework and work, and Yuuki was starting to regret the class-wide mailing system. His whole class had access to his email address. His whole class could be doing this, so he should feel lucky that it was just Yamada and not, say, another group of bullies determined to make his life a living hell like it was in middle school.

Yamada was simple. Yamada was small-fry.

Yuuki was still terrified. “But why?” he asked the table.

His phone buzzed. This time, it wound up flung across his apartment where it made a tiny, but noticeable, dent in the wall.

Yuuki stared at it. Ice flooded his veins; he crawled over to where his phone lay and hoped he hadn’t broken something.

Akira, the videos, the photos—everything he carried with him of the one he cared about the most was on that phone. Futaba could tease him about upgrading all she liked, but if he did, he would lose the app and that tenuous string of a connection to Akira. There was every chance that Akira would use that string come home, like climbing the spider’s thread out of hell, and Yuuki wasn’t going to take it away.

He’d really be awful, then.

When he finally worked up the courage to flip his phone over and check for any damages, his hands shook. The screen wasn’t cracked, by some miracle Yuuki decided not to pry into, and when he turned it on, everything still worked.

His phone buzzed. It was safe on the floor but he still jumped, nearly sending his head through the wall.

Dad: **Unless you’re busy. We can reschedule again if we need to.**

He didn’t trust his hands to properly type. Yuuki called him instead, put the call on speakerphone, and laid down next to it. Blissful darkness and phone static as it rang. His head throbbed; he probed at the sore spot, wishing it was Akira running his fingers through his hair.

Then his dad picked up. “Yuuki? Is something wrong?”

“You scared me,” he said.

“Oh,” Hirotaka said. Sometimes it was easier, if Yuuki didn’t think of him as his dad; Hirotaka was a person that made mistakes, the same way Yuuki or Ryuji or Futaba did. Dads, Yuuki felt, were supposed to be perfect, and that wasn’t Hirotaka by a long shot. “I’m sorry.”

He was trying, though, to be better. More involved, even if that still meant nothing more than making sure Yuuki had money in his bank account every month.

“It’s not really your fault,” Yuuki said. “I was jumpy anyway, the end of the semester’s coming up. What were you asking?”

“I finally have time off tonight, and was wondering if you’d still like to go have dinner.”

“Sure,” Yuuki said. Boss had him working every morning, anyway, and his shift had ended hours ago, and Yuuki knew sure how well he would have taken to lying around even longer listening to his phone buzz as Yamada pestered him with invitations.

Yuuki thought of that group of strangers and shuddered.

“Well, good, then,” Hirotaka said. “Where would you like to go?”

“No curry.” Yuuki liked it enough, but Boss seemed to think he and his friends all needed handouts. Yuuki had containers of it in his tiny fridge, though these were his own creation and not exactly fit to sell at Leblanc. Boss had said it was good enough to eat at home and let him take the whole pot.

Yuuki didn’t know what to do with it.

“I think only Mr. Sakura sells curry, Yuuki,” Hirotaka chuckled. “Anywhere else?”

“No ramen.” Ryuji loved ramen. Ryuji loved getting it after their Friday workouts, and Yuuki was contemplating a way to flush all the salt out of his system. His blood was probably ten-percent ramen broth. “Or beef bowls,” because, of course, Ryuji loved those too, “or burgers.”

There was a Big Bang Burger on campus that gave out free sandwiches and fries at closing time on Saturdays. Yuuki’s last class was right next to the dining hall, and he somehow—always, without even trying—came out with a burger every time. It was free food so he wasn’t going to waste it, but, still.

If he could live off of tap water and rice for a while, he thought he’d be okay.

Hirotaka only hummed, thinking. “Well, there’s Chinese, sushi, French, Italian… I’ll admit I’ve been craving sashimi lately.”

Sushi? “Isn’t that expensive, though?”

“Good sashimi is worth every cent, Yuuki.”

How long had it been since he had sushi? They had had some at the graduation party, hadn’t they? It felt like forever. It felt like no time at all.

But, like he wanted, it was the only thing that wouldn’t be fried, or deep-fried, or drowned in thick sauces. But it was so expensive, and Hirotaka couldn’t be that well off…

But, for once, Hirotaka was suggesting something he wanted. Yuuki couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that; back in middle school, maybe, when Yuuki said he wanted to try out for the volleyball team, to make something of himself. Hirotaka had clapped a hand on his shoulder and said, “I’d like that, Yuuki,” and he had meant it, in the end.

“Okay,” Yuuki said.

“Really?” Hirotaka sounded surprised.

“Yeah, really,” Yuuki confirmed. “Sushi it is. Where am I heading?”

Hirotaka gave him an address that was almost forty minutes away by train. He told his dad so, and they decided to meet up in two hours—enough time for Hirotaka to clock out, and for Yuuki to take a quick shower and change so he didn’t smell like curry and coffee at a fancy sushi place. The smell had probably soaked into his bones like the ramen broth, but he didn’t smell anything when he checked, and he nearly tripped out the door in his haste not to make his dad wait.

A forty-minute train ride could become two or three hours with a single delay, and Yuuki wasn’t going to risk it.

But, of course, as soon as he stepped out of the station his phone buzzed.

Futaba, at last, sending him a message. **Why is your chat ID still Mishima**

Futaba, who could change it whenever she liked, was never going to be someone he could understand deeply. Anxiety was one thing—needing help staying grounded in reality was one thing—but outright ignoring all of his apologies? Why did he even bother sending them all?

Mishima: **I never got around to changing it**

Alibaba: **Yeah, sure. So what’s so special about this file you sent me? It’s just music**

Mishima: **You mean you didn’t take it? It was in with my videos**

Mishima: **The ones of Akira**

If she denied it, that would settle it: the video was somehow related to making Akira cut the connection, like a bonus image on the title screen for fully completing a game.

… And this Futaba who typed in complete sentences with good grammar kind of scared him. Was she pissed because he didn’t see her messages yesterday?

Well, it couldn’t hurt to keep explaining, could it?

Mishima: **I spent half the night trying to see if there was a hidden message in the video itself, but there wasn’t anything. It’s just the song**

He could still mouth half the lyrics, Akira’s singing voice a ghostly tenor that rocked through his ear. With his earbuds in it had felt almost like Akira was at his back, singing right into his ear, and for a while he had dozed off and dreamed that he was.

Then he had woken up to toddler stomping, a dozen missed messages from Futaba, and the weird sticky press of his earbuds. He had known then that he wasn’t going to get back to sleep and had dragged himself over to his laptop.

Alibaba: **Nope wasnt me**

Oh, good. She wasn’t mad anymore. That, or the intrigue of another piece to the ever-growing puzzle that was the phone app was too enticing to ignore him over.

Alibaba: **nyway bring it over and ill copy it and check it out**

Mishima: **Can’t. Going to dinner with my dad**

Alibaba: **ugh loser**

And sent him a picture of Mona, glaring at her camera. Yuuki, his one night over at her place, had only heard the jingle of Mona’s bell late in the night. Mona hated everyone aside from his owner, and Yuuki was glad he hadn’t left with scratches down his arm.

He sent her a thumbs-up emoji in return. He could ask what the problem the other day had been some other time; Futaba typically only responded to messages when she felt like it, and not when they got to her, even though she was practically glued to her phone like he was. Besides, he didn’t want to press her and ruin her—probably fragile—good mood.

Then he sighed, dug his earbuds out, and put on the song again as he window shopped. It was the easiest way to kill his battery, but he didn’t care: he needed a distraction from Futaba, and Yamada, and—well, everything else, like having Boss pull out every curry spice he owned so that Yuuki could practice and experiment, and having Mrs. Amamiya call him this morning to confirm when he would visit.

(He’d forgotten all about it, and made up a date next week that he had then scribbled on a post-it and stuck to his fridge.)

A hand clapped on his shoulder startled him out of his thoughts. Yuuki spun around, expecting his dad—and paled at the sight of Yamada in his dimpled-cheeks glory.

Was it just Yuuki, or did his lips look fuller than before?

Yamada mimed something, tugging at his ear—right, his earbuds. Yuuki had one out before he realized it was a bad idea; Yamada grinned at him, a smile full of teeth so white they were blinding.

“Didn’t expect to see you here, Mishima,” he said.

“Uh,” Yuuki croaked, still staring at his teeth—his smile—the dimples in his cheeks. It was completely unfair that a smile could be so captivating that he forgot how to talk.

“Did you get my messages?”

Yuuki nodded. “I—uh, I did. I was busy. Couldn’t reply.”

“Well, you’re not busy now, are you?”

“I, um. I guess not.”

Akira’s voice was getting lost in this crowd, in Yamada’s questions. Yuuki dug for his phone and stopped the video, and felt a bit heavier for it.

Guilt, now? Why?

“Since you’re right here I guess I can ask again: do you want to come to the mixer on Saturday?” Yamada asked, and grinned. “A buddy of mine says he got the Venus of Shogi to come! Can you believe it?”

“Maybe,” Yuuki said. He was maybe-kind-of friends with Takamaki, after all. He was starting to feel like he was surrounded by a bunch of models; Yusuke was stupidly tall and a gentleman any girl would probably die to hang off the arm of, and Takamaki practically radiated her own inner light. Next to them, Yuuki was nothing.

“‘Maybe’? What’s that supposed to—oh, right, you said you weren’t interested in a girlfriend.”

“Or, uh, in shogi.”

If he focused on something behind Yamada, he could kind of look at his face as it blurred nearly beyond recognition. No more dimples or bright teeth or that eye mole, just the reflection of the sun in the glass.

But Yamada ducked in closer. Yuuki took half a step back before he even knew it. “Well,” Yamada said, his voice ducking low again, like it had that first time they talked, forever ago, “my buddy says she’s bringing a friend of hers with her, some artist she knew back in high school or something. She said he’s not looking for a girlfriend, either, but he had to go if we wanted her there.”

“I, uh, okay,” Yuuki forced out. This close, Yamada smelled like soap and citrus shampoo; his breath smelled like mint. Why could he smell Yamada’s breath? Why was Yamada talking about some friend of some shogi player in the first place?

“Huh, you’re doing it again,” Yamada said.

“Doing what?”

“This.” He tapped Yuuki’s hand where it had drawn up, as always, to fuss with Akira’s ring beneath his shirt. This close Yamada could probably see the outline of the rings—he could tell that there were two, not just one, and in that instant Yuuki could see Kamoshida in him: the slight cold tint of his eyes as he searched Yuuki’s face for an answer; the malicious curve of his grin as he asked, “What’s that about?”

Yuuki fought for an answer. He didn’t have one. “It’s nothing.”

“It can’t be nothing, or you wouldn’t be hiding it,” was the response. “If it was just fashion, you’d show it off.”

“If I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn’t be hiding it, either,” Yuuki said.

“Is it that bad?”

Yuuki didn’t answer. It wasn’t that it was bad in the way Yamada had to be thinking—dead parents or a dead lover or that Yuuki was dating someone in the military deployed overseas—but it felt like it. Akira was worlds away, fighting for his freedom in another dimension with the help of a bunch of people who treated his life like a game. Yuuki was trying to hold onto hope that even one of them would help him come home, but the flesh-and-blood people he could be getting to know instead kept getting in the way.

He wanted. He didn’t want. None of this was fair, and his head was a maelstrom of thoughts and desires that would never see the light of day.

It could be worse, he thought. He could be feeling this weird attraction-repulsion for Ryuji or Yusuke and still have to suffer whenever they met up. It could be infinitely worse.

“Okay, then,” Yamada said, and backed off. Yuuki breathed easier with every extra inch. “But, for real, the mixer: it’s really just for networking, making some friends. I’m sure Miss Togo’s artist friend is going to be sitting in corner sketching the whole time. Maybe you guys’ll get along.”

“Why do you want me there?”

Yamada didn’t even look surprised by the question. “Because you look lonely,” was his simple answer, “and I think that’s pretty sad. Everybody needs friends, right? Just—just give it ten minutes, or five, and if you don’t like it I’ll help you get out. Okay?”

Five or ten minutes. The last time he gave something five or ten minutes, he wound up passed out on the floor. Yuuki wasn’t keen on going through that again, especially not with Akira gone.

And he had friends. Did he really need more? Did he really look so lonely in class, rushing through all of the homework he could during for more free time later?

Akira would want him to get along with his classmates. Akira would encourage him to go—but only if he wanted to, only if he was comfortable with it. There wasn’t much Akira could have done in his mental prison, and the idea of missing out on parties and study groups to stay home must have felt like a slap in the face, even though Yuuki spent all that time with him, instead.

(And if he did go, Akira would call him brave when he came back. Akira always called him brave. Yuuki missed that the most.)

But five or ten minutes wasn’t that long. He could—he could go for five or ten minutes, mingle a little, and then make up some excuse to leave, and Yamada would help him get out of there.

Provided there wasn’t some other motive for it, like shoving Yuuki in a locker, or locking him in a convenient closet. But this wasn’t middle school anymore, where if Yamada had wanted to, he would have done it already, and with a laughing gaggle of goons at his back.

Yuuki really, _really_ , just did not like the shrewd, calculating look in his eye, like he was measuring Yuuki for all he was worth. It wouldn’t be much, save for the rings, and Yuuki would rather die than lose them.

But—five or ten minutes. Surely that wasn’t enough time to trap him somewhere, right?

“Fine,” he finally said, against every instinct screaming that there was something off about all of this, that there was something sinister about Yamada’s intentions, that there was something wrong with a guy willing to harass his own classmate to go to a _mixer_.

But Yamada just grinned, smile perfect, his teeth perfectly straight. “Great! I’ll text you the details, okay?”

Yuuki nodded. Even when Yamada finally—finally!—left him alone, he didn’t feel any safer than before.

“Yuuki,” his dad said behind him, and he winced in surprise.

“Hey, Dad,” he said, and wished he could make his feet move more than two centimeters at a time. His knees wobbled. He needed to sit down and breathe for a few minutes, concentrating on nothing—or maybe just on Akira’s voice, singing of wishes and peace.

The good thing about having a father who was trying to make up for being distant in the past was that he didn’t stand there in the middle of the sidewalk and start grilling him; Hirotaka instead helped him over to a wall outside some fancy eatery’s dining terrace, where he could lean and catch his breath and wonder what was Yamada’s real problem, because it couldn’t just be that Yuuki looked lonely. No one had ever talked to him or bothered him over it. No one had ever been this persistent.

Even Ryuji knew how to take a hint.

Hell, even his dad knew how to take a hint. The man stood there, still as a statue, and watched the crowd go by without saying anything.

Yuuki sighed. “Guess I’m going to a mixer.”

“I guess you are,” Hirotaka said. Then, after a pause where he had to be deliberating whether to say it or not: “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

“Yeah.” Or as much as he could be, anyway. Even girls could be dangerous. “Sorry, I know we were going to get dinner.”

“It can wait,” Hirotaka said. “You should go.”

“It’s not tonight, it’s on Saturday. I just—you know, we could be at the restaurant by now, and instead we’re loitering.”

“I’m not going to make you walk when you look like that.”

For a brief second, Yuuki wondered what he looked like. Pale and drawn from dealing with Yamada, probably, and from the queasiness of his stomach as his brain roiled against all the what-ifs it was feeding him. People didn’t get that close unless they wanted something, and Yuuki was flip-flopping between _he wants to punch me_ and _he wants to kiss me_.

Which just. Seemed wrong. Yamada had to be straight, like almost everyone else. Yuuki was the outlier here, and there was no way Yamada didn’t have a clue about it by now.

“What does he want from me, Dad?” he asked, feeling too small and too helpless to figure it out on his own. He barely realized he was crouching, covering his stomach, one hand going up to run through his hair. “I mean, it can’t—can’t just be a—a mixer, right? He’s been bugging me for months about it. I don’t get him at all.”

“People are very difficult to understand, Yuuki.” Another pause. “But if you want to get to know him, you have to put in the effort, too.”

That was the problem: Yuuki only wanted to know his intentions. Yuuki didn’t want to be friends with Yamada, who gave him headaches every time he thought about him; Yuuki just wanted to know if this was an elaborate prank, or a rib on a suspected gay kid, or just what Yamada had said he wanted: for Yuuki to go to a mixer as their extra guy. Yamada never asked him for class notes or to a study group for exams. Yuuki only ever saw him in one class.

(Before the first punch landed, Yuuki had thought Kamoshida decent, too. He worked his teams hard because they had something to prove and a title to keep and by the time it was too late to leave, Yuuki had been swallowed by his downward spiral. The ones who quit early were lucky, even if Kamoshida gave whole classes grueling punishments for the unfortunate circumstance of having a quitter in their midst.

Yuuki hadn’t known it, but Kamoshida hated quitters almost as much as Yuuki hated math. Kamoshida just had different ways of dealing with his hate.

Yamada could be another Kamoshida. Yamada could also just be some well-meaning classmate who would realize that Yuuki was a waste of his time soon enough, anyway.)

Yuuki shook his head. Yamada wasn’t another Kamoshida—not yet, and Yuuki wasn’t likely to get proof without sticking his neck out like an idiot—and while that didn’t mean that Yuuki shouldn’t wonder about the hows and whys of his very sudden attachment…

Yuuki was tired. Tired of thinking about it, tired of wondering what the fuck he wanted.

There was a very, very easy way of figuring things out, after all. If Yamada wasn’t going to say, then Yuuki would have to act.

Even if it felt like betrayal just to think it.

… Akira would be disappointed.

His stomach growled. He sighed; life wasn’t about to get easier, and he would need the energy to get through it.

And, of course, now he was craving sashimi, too.

“Let’s go get dinner,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Hirotaka asked. “We can wait a bit longer, if you still aren’t feeling well.”

“I’ll feel better once I’ve eaten.” Or at the very least, gotten anything in his stomach to later puke up out of nerves. It would be a waste of good sushi to go throwing it up when he got home, but if that was what his stomach demanded, Yuuki would have no choice but to oblige. He gestured to the street and its evening crowd, and said, “Lead the way.”

Hirotaka didn’t argue any further. He stepped out into the throng, and Yuuki followed in his shadow, fumbling for the phone in his pocket. Akira’s voice sang a smooth stream into his ears.

Yuuki didn’t try to listen. He let the noise wash over him like the tide and felt something inside him relax.

Everything, he thought, would be alright.

* * *

Everything was not alright.

Ryuji scanned the contents strewn across his room for the fifth time, came up empty-handed yet again, and nearly groaned. The absolute latest he could leave in time to meet Ann was in the next five minutes, and he still couldn’t find a decent shirt to wear; there was no way she would like any of his tees, and he knew he looked stupid in button-downs and polos—but that was all he had. Nothing plain, nothing that wasn’t screaming-yellow or neon-green or bright red save his gym clothes, and he definitely wasn’t wearing those.

Maybe if he turned one inside out… Ann wouldn’t notice, right?

“Oh, she’ll notice, Ryuji,” said his mother, from the door. There was a half-eaten apple in her hand, and she took another bite as he spun around.

“Ma! What the eff?! How long’ve you been there?”

“Long enough,” she said. “Put a belt on, dear.”

He did so, looping it through as he went back to his search, and nearly wound up eating floor as his foot caught on a pair of pants. He shook them off.

“Like all teenage boys, my son is a fool,” his ma complained, picking her way through the mess. “Leave it to him to wait until the last minute to pick an outfit for his date.”

“It ain’t a date,” he grumbled. “We’re getting crepes ‘n _then_ I’m gonna tell her.”

His ma picked up a mostly-solid color tank top and a button-down shirt, shoved the apple in her mouth, and beat out the wrinkles. She held them out to him, and when he took them, said, “Wear one of those. You’ll look good enough, and if she likes you back it won’t matter much. Your dad—he confessed to me in a suit, just back from job hunting, and I thought he was better for it. Turned out wrong, didn’t I?”

“Ma,” he said, but didn’t know what else to say. Obviously the clothes didn’t make the man, or Ryuji’s dad wouldn’t have been a deadbeat drunk. He would’ve been successful—or maybe he was, and he just drank all his money away.

So instead of talking, he put the tank on. Accepted the extra yen his ma gave him because it should be his treat if he was asking Ann out, and hugged her, hard.

“You’re the best,” he said into a mouthful of her hair.

“Don’t say that, I’m going to make you tell me everything when you get home,” she told him, then swatted his arm. “Now, get going, or you’ll be late.”

“Okay,” he said, and knew he was grinning before he even let go; then he was out the door and on the train to Shibuya with seconds to spare.

He hoped Ann wasn’t waiting there already, out in the summer heat made worse by the sidewalk. He hoped she was keeping cool somewhere—maybe in the underground mall, where she could window shop.

… He hoped she’d say yes. She had plenty of reasons not to, but he hoped she did, even if he smelled a little musty, and even if he had potentially ruined his chances by telling her all that shit before. Girls were perceptive, and Ryuji knew he was a landmine, even if he was doing his best not to be.

His phone buzzed. Ann, with a message: **We’re here!!!**

And a picture: her and Shiho, the former volleyball player with an embarrassed grin on her face while Ann beamed, the Hachiko statue visible off to the side.

Fuck.

The mother three seats down glared at him, so he must have said it out loud.

How could he forget that Shiho was in town for a week? How could he forget that Shiho was going with them on the beach trip tomorrow? How could he have not realized that Shiho was staying with her best friend, and that of course Ann would bring her along?

There was no way he could confess now, with her best friend watching.

He bit his lip and pretended to sneeze. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

And before he could think of a way out of it, the train pulled in. Ryuji shoved his phone back in his pocket; his reflection was glowering, but there wasn’t much he could about that, now.

Think about the positive side, he told himself. He could go shopping for a better shirt to wear, something Ann would like. He could drag Yuuki along after one of their gym visits, have more guy time—or maybe Yusuke would be the better person to ask. Ryuji hadn’t seen him much, lately.

Well, he kinda knew the reason for that, now.

“Ryuji!” Ann cried, from across the station square. There weren’t that many blond guys around, but he wouldn’t put it past her to shout his name at every blond head she saw from a distance, and judging from the grumbles and glares from everyone else in the crowd, she’d been doing just that.

“Geez,” she said, after he ambled over. “What took so long?”

“Uh, I’m here on time,” he said. “Hey to you, too. Hey, Shiho.”

“Hello,” she said, eyeing the crowd in a way he didn’t like, like she was searching for Kamoshida among them all. Ann grabbed them both by the arm and tugged them over to the crepes stand—or the line, anyway. It stretched nearly all the way down to the 777, and Ryuji settled in for a wait, Ann’s elbow hooked through his a warm weight he couldn’t help but pay attention to. Her hair was up in some fancy hairstyle involving a dozen braids all looped around each other; Shiho’s work, he’d bet money on it. The Ann he remembered didn’t have the attention span for fancy hairstyles.

Hey, neither did he. He gelled his, ran a comb over the mess, and called it a day.

Shiho and Ann wound up chattering about sweets—Ann wanted a double- or triple-chocolate crepe, and Shiho remarked that she should just get a slice of cake, to which Ann said that if she wanted cake, she would have gone to a bakery, and it devolved from there—and the line crept forward.

In the muggy summer heat, Ryuji yawned. He tugged his phone out of his pocket to check the time and shoved it back in when he contemplated texting Yuuki or Yusuke; today was supposed to be about Ann, and showing her that he could be attentive, damn it, and not so spacy.

Ann’s nails were bright blue and trailing up and down his arm. He wondered if she knew she was doing it, then wondered if she knew she was doing it and didn’t want to be, if she would stop. He half-wished she would; every trail left his skin shivering for more contact, sent a trickle of heat low in his belly.

Fuck.

(The other half of that wish was spent rejoicing in the contact. He didn’t want it to end.)

“Yeah!” Ann said, loud enough to startle him out of… wherever he’d been going. No place good, that was for sure. “What about you, Ryuji? What kind of crepe are you getting?”

“Uh,” he said, mind whirling. He’d passed by the place often enough and glanced at their menu out of curiosity, but the crepe stand was always packed with girls and he always craved ramen after a workout. But, if he remembered right… “Chicken teriyaki,” he declared.

“Oh, that sounds good, too,” Shiho said.

“You can’t beat chocolate, though,” Ann said.

“Or blueberry,” Shiho said.

“No, no! Strawberry, Shiho, and then blueberry.”

“Blueberry, banana-apple, then strawberry.”

He had no idea what they were doing. Were these crepe flavors, or just more sweet shit girls liked? He’d never heard of anyone making a dessert based off of blueberries.

But now he wanted some. The only fruit they had at home were those couple of apples that needed to be eaten soon, before they got mushy. Mushy fruit was the worst.

(Ann’s hand on his arm, Ann’s leg pressing his—)

At some point their faux-argument dropped off. Ann sighed. “I still can’t believe I’m going to be a whole year behind you guys now. This sucks.”

Shiho didn’t say anything. Maybe she was squeezing Ann’s arm in sisterly solidarity. Ryuji didn’t know.

“And I’m going to have to take entrance exams, too,” Ann went on. “I’m already studying for them. Not much of a summer break, is it?”

“If by ‘studying’ you mean ‘falling asleep at your desk within five minutes,’ Ann,” Shiho started, and Ann took her arm out of Ryuji’s to swat at her. Shiho stopped talking to laugh.

Ryuji’s arm felt cold. And he felt weird, too, like an outsider tagging along—a third wheel. Which was stupid, because Ann said she and Shiho weren’t dating, and they were paying him enough attention. He was the one not putting any effort into this.

“Yeah, Ann,” he said, “back in high school didn’t you say you’d rather clean than study—ow!”

She swatted at him with a pout on her face—then started, and froze in place.

They were right by the shady alley next to the crepe stand, the one Ryuji spotted guys in suits or camo gear going in and out of. There was an airsoft shop somewhere in there, but Ryuji had never gone. The place was creepy; Protein Lovers at least had a sign he could see from the street, and lights by the door. There was nothing back there to dispel the gloom except for the distant neon glare of a sign, and in its eerie green glow Makoto Niijima ducked back down the alley.

“Was that—” Shiho started to ask.

“Niijima,” Ann said. “Yeah, it was. But—she’s still in Tokyo? Wouldn’t it be better if she left?”

Ryuji fought down the urge to run after her. “I see her in Leblanc sometimes,” if twice counted as ‘sometimes,’ “and we talked a bit. She said she had a reason, but I never asked for it.”

Shiho hummed. Ann continued frowning at the alley even as the line forced them to move past it. Then she said, “She looks so different now.”

“Yeah,” Ryuji agreed, because Niijima was different in that, at least. Hair barely combed, toddler bows clipped in, clothes worn down to holes at the seams. “I think she mentioned something about a kid. A friend of hers had one, I think, and she was helping with it.”

“With a kid?” Ann’s eyes went wide. “Niijima?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She had a little bow in her hair, and I asked about it.”

“That is surprising,” Shiho said. Her brow crinkled in thought. “But I thought Niijima didn’t have any friends in school. She got along with everyone, but not well enough to have friends.”

Ryuji shrugged. For all he knew, Niijima met her new bestie in juvie. For all he knew, it wasn’t a friend at all—maybe her landlord had a kid, or she was babysitting as a side job, another to add to the list. Guinea pig in a clinical trial; he could have sworn he’d seen her working at the 777 by his apartment a couple of times; and whatever she was doing down the alley had to be work, too.

Airsoft guns weren’t cheap, and Niijima had already said she was struggling for cash. There was no way she was buying any, unless survival games suddenly had huge payouts.

Ryuji could hear the smile in her voice as Shiho went on, “But people change. We may think it’s only been two years, but two years is a long time, and that’s time enough to reflect.”

Ann frowned at that, looking like she was going to disagree—but then it was their turn to order, and she gasped, asking about double- or triple-chocolate crepes.

Ryuji, with his gaze still trained on the alley, noticed Niijima sneak into the crowd and head up the street—to another job, or to the underground mall where she could head up to the station and bypass their group.

He wondered where she lived, now that her prospects were slim. Definitely nowhere good for a kid to be raised, but there wasn’t anything Niijima or her friend could do about that, if they were juvie buddies.

Ann shoved a crepe into his arm, and he took it mechanically as she dug out her wallet and paid.

Shit. There went his chance to show that he wasn’t a complete asshole who didn’t think of his friends.

He gaped at her as she took her change; Shiho, sporting a pair of crepes—one of which was a towering monstrosity of chocolate whipped cream that dwarfed her hand—shrugged at him. He could smell teriyaki sauce; when he looked at the one she gave him, shredded chicken and onions, grilled and slathered in sauce, greeted him.

It smelled amazing.

But he couldn’t believe that after all that worrying, Ann had wound up paying for him, too. That—that wasn’t how pseudo-dates were supposed to go. Then again, in his head, Shiho hadn’t been here, either.

Shiho led them through the crowd, back to the Hachiko statue where the shade offered some respite from the heat. The sun was beginning to set by now, and the streetlights turned on one by one as they passed by—which meant the crowd was somehow worse than before, filled with teens on their breaks heading home and gaggles of businessmen in full suits heading to bars or restaurants to schmooze with their bosses.

He hadn’t noticed before, but Shiho walked with a slight limp, as if her legs couldn’t or wouldn’t move in tandem anymore. The only tell was the erratic bob of whipped cream in her hand as it jerked up, down, then to the side as she tried to catch her balance, and there were more people out for her to run into—and that, of course, was when he noticed Ann marching right behind, hands free and ready to catch her if she fell.

Which meant he felt even worse.

This was all going so badly, he lamented as Shiho chose part of the wall behind the statue to lean on. He wasn’t supposed to make Ann treat him; he wasn’t supposed to make Ann watch out for her friend in a crowd full of people all by herself.

He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, scratching where the gel had dried on his scalp. He really needed to do a better job, maybe learn some of those fancy-casual styles that were in magazines. He could ask Ann—she would surely know, or know someone else who would know—but his brain buzzed at him. He was already being shitty, making Ann do all this stuff; he didn’t need to bother her anymore.

… But he was sick of sitting on it. Sick of going to bed at night and dreaming about her, sick of waking up to the ghost of her laughter in his ears and the memory of her hair shining in the sun blinding his eyes. Sick of getting tongue-tied when it mattered, and sick of wondering when a good time would be.

Anytime would be a good time, he thought, and as his ma had told him. What mattered was that he made it sound sincere, instead of like a thank-you. What mattered was that, as long as he told her, no matter how their relationship changed, she would never have to wonder what had gone wrong.

(What was worse, somehow, was that he could tell what her arguments for the day would be: Ann had been the one to invite him to get crepes, so of course she would pay; Shiho was her best friend, so of course Ann would make sure she could walk without falling.)

He took a bite of his crepe and let his thoughts drift away to the taste of chicken teriyaki, the crisp bite of onion, the sharp crunch of shredded lettuce. The thing was huge, too, easily twice as big as his hand—but Ann’s was bigger, and he realized with a jolt that in the amount of time it had taken them to settle in against the wall and for Ryuji’s thoughts to take a nosedive, Ann had split that mound of chocolate whipped cream in half. Shiho’s simple blueberry cream crepe was now topped with the rest, and Shiho stared at it, as transfixed as he was.

Ann just grinned, licking cream off her fingers. The bite she took of her own was huge. There was whipped cream on her nose.

Ryuji forced his gaze to the bushes behind them and took another bite, then another. He wasn’t sure if he was chewing enough, but he found he didn’t care: anything, even the salty-sweet taste of teriyaki, was better than watching Ann thumb the cream from her nose and lick it off. Anything was better than watching Ann as she devoured her much sought after double- or triple-chocolate crepe and wishing she looked at him like that.

Suddenly he was pissed that he asked the others to go radio silent tonight—there wouldn’t be any debug questions from Futaba for him to answer, and there wouldn’t be any of Yusuke’s weird artsy pining (Yusuke had once sent him a long-ass text at two in the morning, questioning whether the moon felt as forlorn as he did gazing on an empty lake. Ryuji had no idea what to say to that, and asked what he was doing out at two in the morning, and got a long, rambling answer that basically amounted to _I thought of Yuuki and got too excited to sleep_ , which was way too much info), and there wouldn’t be any sudden crisis from Yuuki for him to solve. He’d get nothing unless he pulled his phone out and asked for it, and that was shit manners when hanging out with anybody, much less someone he wanted to date.

About halfway through her crepe, Ann said, “Still, Niijima, huh. I can’t imagine her watching over a toddler.”

 _I can_ , he wanted to say, but the look on her face stopped him. Sure it was a weird idea, but was it so weird that it meant she had to glare at her crepe like it killed her puppy?

Considering how much chocolate was in it, it would.

“I mean,” Ann went on, “she couldn’t even watch over some students.”

“Ann,” Shiho said.

“It’s true,” she insisted. “What did she do for us, when Kamoshida was lording it over the school? What did she do, aside from be a perfect little princess, locked away in her tower?”

“You can’t be mad at her for that,” Ryuji said. Ann glared at him instead, gripping her crepe so hard it had to be crumbling in its wrapper. “She was a student, too; the police wouldn’t have listened to her anymore than they would’ve listened to you or me. Hell, they wouldn’t listen to my ma. Kobayakawa had some serious pull, and anything she would’ve done would’ve just made her life that much harder.”

All of her grievances over his uniform adjustments aside, Niijima hadn’t had any power. Kamoshida did; Kobayakawa did. The Student Council President was just a person who decided budgets for sports days and counted votes for the guest speaker at the school festival—in other words, she did all the annoying shit for the students so the teachers wouldn’t have to.

“That’s probably why she joined that mafia,” he said. “Because if she did she’d get proof for the police to follow up on. That Kaneshiro guy had to have more pull than some principal did, and there was no way the police were going to follow up on some rumor from a Shujin student back then.”

Not if all the gossip Ryuji had heard last year was true, anyway. Rumors about Kaneshiro funneling money to Shido and his group to earn pretty bonuses like the police turning a blind eye to all the crime he was doing; naturally, when Niijima went to the right precinct with all of her evidence, the deal would have been over.

Or at least, that was what everyone thought. Ryuji thought it was too big of a coincidence to be real; this wasn’t some game or TV show, after all, where everything that happened connected neatly together at the end.

“I didn’t like her much, either,” he finished, “but that don’t mean I have to blame her for everything. It was Kamoshida’s fault. It was Kobayakawa’s fault. But it wasn’t hers.”

Because if it was Niijima’s fault, then it was Ryuji’s fault. It was his ma’s fault, and Shiho’s fault, and Yuuki’s fault, and Ann’s fault. Every single person who was hurt or sat back and shut their mouths and pretended it wasn’t happening—it was their fault for not being loud enough, annoying enough; their fault for not refusing to be cowed and intimidated and silenced out of fear.

Ann must have realized this; her eyes went glassy, shiny, and she bent her head down and shoved as much of her crepe in her mouth that would fit. He looked away as she squeezed out tears and finished the last of his food.

This was not the right time, and this was not the right place—but if he lost the will now, he’d never say it.

“Ann,” he said, moving to stand in front of her, “listen, okay? I think you’re amazing. You went through all of that and can still smile. You went through all of that _with_ a smile. You’re stronger than anybody out there, even Niijima and me. But just because you’re strong doesn’t mean you don’t need people to lean on, right? Let me be one of those people for you.”

He knew nothing he was saying was coming out right. Ann was beautiful—gorgeous—smart and intuitive. She’d seen straight through Yusuke after almost two years apart as if he were made of glass, while Ryuji hadn’t noticed a thing.

But she was strong, too. When everything went to shit their junior year, it had been Ann who dragged them all together. Ann, with her cheery smiles and easy laughter. Ann, with a spirit that shone like the sun.

Ann, who wasn’t saying anything. She stared him in the face, mouth agape as she processed it all, a bit of cream of her lip. Ryuji wanted to wipe it off but clenched his hands around the crepe paper instead.

He was not going to ruin this by being a creep.

He was definitely not going to ruin this by passing out, either. “Would you—uh,” he cleared his throat, “would you go out with me?”

Shiho squealed, a short little noise that cut off as her hands flew to stifle it. He could still hear it, though, over the noise of the crowd: a high-pitched whine in her throat, escaping through the cracks of her fingers.

Or maybe that was the gaggle of girls over by the underground mall entrance. He couldn’t be sure.

“I, uh,” Ann said, for once lost for words. She stared at him, at the crepe still in her hands, then back to him again—but finally nodded. “Okay.”

Relief flooded through him. He wanted to collapse into a puddle; he wanted to jump for joy and run a marathon, bad leg or no. “You mean it?” he asked, just to be sure.

Ann nodded again, then seemed to notice the cream and licked it off. “Yeah, I mean it.”

He nodded, and couldn’t keep the grin from his face. Everything he wanted to say seemed too ordinary for something like this, but Ann matched his grin with her own, and then they were laughing. Shiho stared at them both and probably stared at them some more once Ryuji screwed his eyes shut, one hand reaching for Ann’s blindly.

He found her crepe instead. Ann wasn’t fazed by the brush of his fingers on hers and grasped him; her skin was soft, the touch light, as if he was holding a cloud.

Maybe he was.

In that instant, he allowed himself the thought that every would be alright, after all.

* * *

Everything was not alright.

Shinya’s mom hadn’t bothered to wake him up in the morning, for one thing, which meant she was still mad. She had left him food in the microwave, but by the time he got to it none of it was appealing. He shoved it in the fridge for later, ignored the heavy weight of his empty stomach, and staggered back to bed.

Pink Girl, still in the same area he’d been grinding in last night—this morning?—waited for him, as patient for his return as—as—

Well, he wasn’t sure. That asshole gym teacher? The Student Council President’s lackeys, who liked to follow him around every few weeks with the uniform rulebook under their arms? He couldn’t even count the arcade, because no one there was ever excited to see him unless it was for a rematch. The employees hated his gambling habits, too, because everyone who lost always complained.

But that was what it meant to win. Those who won gained, and those who lost, lost.

So… what was Shinya?

He didn’t feel like a winner. He didn’t feel like a king; his cuts and scrapes stung, and the soles of his feet burned from the shards of ceramic stuck in his socks his mother had missed, too tiny to be noticeable to the naked eye.

He took them off and threw them on the floor, picked up his phone to spin Pink Girl in circles again. Just a battle, he thought, and then he would get up to pee. Maybe make some toast, and change out of his clothes.

Fifteen battles and an hour later, he hadn’t. His head was heavy, his mind swimming, but he didn’t want to move. Moving meant doing something else his mom would get mad at him for again.

Not moving meant doing something his mom would get worried over him for, though. She’d think he was sick, that he needed to go to the hospital—but there was nothing a hospital could do for a loser.

_Unless Gun About’s all you’re good at?_

That wasn’t true. Shinya was good at math and composition. Shinya was good at science and swimming, and poker and—

And Gun About.

He got up, letting the wave of dizziness pass over him. He shuffled into the kitchen and checked the microwave.

Nothing.

(What was he looking for?)

He checked his plate of food, chewing handfuls of cold, grainy rice and eggs and salad—nothing.

(Was it even something he could find?)

He checked the table by the door, the one his mom always put her purse on when she got home—nothing.

(Was it even something he wanted?)

She had, for once, forgotten his allowance. She must have been really angry, to not leave him anything.

She must hate him.

It was the only explanation: Shinya was supposed to be a winner, and now that he wasn’t, she hated him. Losers didn’t deserve allowances. Losers didn’t deserve to be listened to. Losers deserved only to wallow in their losses, to whine for rematches, to beg for mercy.

Shinya didn’t want to be a loser. Shinya didn’t want to be one of those guys sitting around at home all the time, too scared to even go to the arcade. Shinya didn’t want to live here, in this empty apartment he was barely welcome in, for the rest of his life. Shinya didn’t want to sit around and listen to guys like Kaoru call him out for not knowing how to cook because his mom never let him.

He shuffled back into his room, fired up his computer, and started researching. He cleaned the floor in the kitchen with the cleaners his mom kept under the sink, checking and double-checking the labels to make sure they weren’t polish or abrasives. He cleaned the floor in the bathroom, too, and the sink, even though his mom must have done it herself last night after he’d been shoved in his room.

Then he looked up something else: what he could cook with all the food in the fridge. Kaoru had said that omelet rice was easy, but Shinya—very briefly, however much he would deny it later—cowered at the stove, and the frying oil, and wound up picking eggshells out of his eggs. What he wound up with was something that could be barely passable omelet rice—it was burned on one side, and the rice had burned, somehow, too, and it didn’t taste as good as his mom’s did—but it was his. It was something he’d made all on his own with no help except from Youcube.

He’d get better at it. He’d stay home more often while his mom was out at work and learn to cook, and clean, and do his own laundry. Kaoru wouldn’t be able to say he was only good at Gun About, then. Shinya wouldn’t feel like such a loser, being babied and pitied by everyone around him because he couldn’t do what they could.

When he collapsed back into bed that night—his mom still out at work and voiding him—his hands stung from the work. They smelled like the lemon-scented cleaners, and despite his brushing he found a piece of burnt egg hiding between his teeth.

He picked up his phone. Pink Girl was still waiting.

But no, that wasn’t right. Pink Girl had a name—he just didn’t want to use it. The guys in Gun About never had names, but Pink Girl did. She had parents and she was strong and she deserved to have him remember it; she’d blown up a robot to try and save her dad. Shinya wished he could say he’d blow up a robot to save his mom right now.

He couldn’t.

He took her to a save point and whispered, too low for even himself to hear, “Good night, Prim.”

And shut the game off and rolled over.


	12. Summer Vacation, Friday

Futaba was, as needless as it was to say, ecstatic about the beach trip. She grinned throughout breakfast despite the unholy hour—who in the world willingly woke up at five in the morning _every day_?—and had dragged her bag down while Sojiro gave Kana another moment to decide if she wanted to go after all.

The answer was no. He hadn’t expected her to change her mind, but he only wanted to be sure—she’d be alone in his house while Wakaba and Futaba were at the beach and Sojiro tended to Leblanc, and after how quickly she’d blown into Tokyo, he was worried she would leave just the same. He was worried that whatever had gone wrong between her and Futaba, it would resolve itself before she left for good.

He just had a feeling that once Kana was gone, she wasn’t coming back.

So they waved Wakaba and Futaba goodbye, cleaned up breakfast, and Sojiro laid out the ground rules: clean up after yourself, don’t open the door for anyone… and try not to have too much fun. He meant the last one to be a joke, but she nodded, serious as ever.

But as he gathered up his keys and his hat and was putting on his shoes, she asked, “Mr. Sakura, what would you do if Futaba and her mom were bad people?”

“Bad people?” What did that mean? Stealing and lying and doing drugs?

“Yeah,” she said, but didn’t clarify.

He took his hat off and ran a hand through his hair. If Wakaba and Futaba were bad people—if they lied and stole and cheated their way through life—what would he do? Turning them in wasn’t high on his list—there was always a reason for the behavior, some nurse had told him when Futaba was still in rehab. There was always a reason, and if it could be fixed, or controlled, or tamped down, everything would be fine. “I’d get them help,” he said.

“And if they couldn’t be helped?”

Was this what she had fought with Futaba over? Whoever Kana had run away from, were they ‘bad’?

Why else would she run away, though? Why else would she come here, where no one was likely to know her, instead of fleeing to a boyfriend or distant family?

He sighed. The things kids these days were going through was enough to make all of his hair go gray. “Then I’d turn them in,” he said. “If they hurt me, I wouldn’t want them to hurt anyone else.”

“Even if it meant you’d have no place to go? Even if it meant you’d have no future?”

For some reason, the Amamiya kid flashed through his head. He’d done the right thing, and look where it had gotten him: in jail, with a record, shoved out of his parent’s house like the unwanted criminal everyone thought he was. He’d done the right thing, and Mishima had said he didn’t regret it.

Because it was the right thing to do. Because despite the stain to his name, he’d helped someone. Because he’d been the only one _willing_ to.

If more people were like the Amamiya kid, the world would be better for it.

“Kid,” he said, and stood to face her. Wakaba had smoothed out the rushed haircut and it bobbed around her shoulders in a way that suggested it was the only haircut Wakaba knew how to give. “Kana. If a kid’s bad, what do his parents do?”

“Punish him,” she said.

“And if he’s still bad?”

“Punish him some more?”

“And if that still doesn’t work?”

She went quiet, thinking. Get the kid help would be the next step, but nobody ever wanted to admit there was something wrong with their kid, ever. Something wrong with the kid meant there was something wrong with their parenting—and even perfect parents could raise little hellions through no fault of their own. Even perfect parents made mistakes and pretended they weren’t responsible, somehow, for the way their kids grew up. Some even supported it, because it was easier than being at fault. No one ever thought that there was something wrong on the inside, in the brain, where no amount of good parenting would matter.

And when those spoiled kids became parents themselves… Well. Sojiro didn’t want to think about that. The child of such kids was staring at his floor, tears pricking the corners of her eyes.

“At the very least, you won’t have no place to go back to,” he said, and knew he was going to regret his next words. He was too soft. All these damn kids were wearing him down. “You can—you can come back here, whenever you want, for as long as you need. Understand?”

Kana closed her eyes. Her mouth, strained to keep the sudden sob in, drew in air. She nodded.

“And you know—you know you have a future. The only way anyone can take that from you is if you let them.” Or if she died, but Sojiro wasn’t going to open that particular can of worms. Not after almost losing Futaba. “Even juvie kids get a second chance, even if it’s not stardom and fame. Understand?”

She nodded again, and left her head hanging so her hair obscured part of her face. He thought he saw tears make tracks down her cheeks in the shadows, but didn’t mention them.

Everyone had the right to a good cry in private, and he needed to get to Leblanc.

“Good,” he said, and still reached out a tentative hand. Kana didn’t stop him. He patted her on the shoulder, marveling at the thinness of her bones, and repeated, “Good. Take care of the house, then.”

“Okay,” Kana said, though her voice was thin and strained, stretched to its limits.

He locked the door as she crumpled to the floor.

* * *

The group of them nearly had an entire car all to themselves. This early in the morning—even during summer break—no one else was heading out to the beach, and Ryuji considered falling back asleep like Yuuki and Futaba were doing, leaning against each other with Wakaba to one side, looking over something on her tablet. He hadn’t gotten up this early since Kamoshida’s takeover of the track team, when he demanded early morning practices that wouldn’t cut into his time with the volleyball team. Ryuji and a couple other guys had always collapsed in the locker room after practice was over to nap for the hour or two before classes started, and once in a while someone forgot to set an alarm, sending all of them into a frenzy over being late.

That was back when Ryuji cared about being late, and keeping his grades up. After the incident with Kamoshida, he mostly kept going to class on time so his ma wasn’t disappointed.

But all thoughts of letting his eyes slip shut and his mind drift away were dashed when Ann’s head hit his shoulder. Her hair hit his arm, and her hand squeezed his a little tighter. It was like a shot of caffeine straight into his veins: just like that, he was awake, all thoughts of drifting off even for a short nap evaporating like smoke.

Shiho, sitting on Ann’s other side, didn’t comment. She only smiled when he looked her way, then went back to her book.

Bless her. After his ma’s grilling last night, he wasn’t sure if he could stand anymore questions about him and Ann—and it was Shiho’s right to tease him mercilessly for dating her, something she didn’t seem keen on doing.

Well, maybe girls looked at it differently. Maybe Shiho had gotten all her ribs in last night with Ann, instead of later with him. Maybe that was why Ann was so tired.

Maybe he was just weirded out by the fact that none of his friends had commented on him and Ann holding hands at the station. Futaba had looked too tired to care, Yuuki had looked too distracted, and Yusuke—he’d given a vague nod that could have been an acknowledgment but might have been a greeting, and was now sitting on the other side of the car with his phone out, earbuds in, and his sketchbook forgotten in his bag.

Something, Ryuji thought, was going on. He’d have to find out what, but not today. He didn’t want to ruin Futaba’s first beach trip.

What kind of asshole would he be if he did that?

But he didn’t want to just sit here for the entire train ride. He hadn’t thought enough ahead to charge his Game Station Life, and he couldn’t play any games on his phone with one hand.

Across the car, Yusuke sighed. He tugged out his earbuds, stowed his phone away, and dragged out his sketchbook. The shadows under his eyes made them seem swollen and bruised and Ryuji contemplated calling him out on it, but that was just how Yusuke was. If Ryuji could get him to promise to sleep tonight, after they got back, Yusuke would do it.

And if he couldn’t, Yusuke would do whatever the hell he wanted. Ryuji wasn’t his mom, although Yusuke seemed to take the opinions of his friends even more seriously than Ryuji did his ma’s opinions.

Ryuji didn’t know what to do with that, aside from making sure Yusuke was eating and sleeping like a normal person. He could pressure Yuuki into telling him just about anything, which was starting to include how late he was staying up working on his site.

“I don’t know what to tell them,” he had admitted, sagging over their table at the ramen shop. “They’re all angry about the app disappearing, and I don’t know why it’s doing that. Then they’re angry because of something that Akira’s said or done, but I can’t speak for him and explain why he did it.” He had snorted into the table at that point. “Maybe the app is sentient. Maybe it can tell when we aren’t serious enough to keep going.”

The thought had been scary back then, and it was scary now. A phone app that could think, and learn, and adapt by itself? Weren’t there movies about that kind of shit?

Ryuji shook the thought away, and gripped Ann’s hand even tighter. The thought of losing anyone else to that other dimension was scary enough without adding evil AI systems to the list, too. Ra Ciela could invade tomorrow and there wouldn’t be anything anyone on Earth could do to stop it.

Without realizing it, he fell asleep to the thought of storming Ra Cielan camps with his friends at his side, like in one of his games. Yuuki and Futaba weren’t any good with guns, so they stayed back and called the shots while Yusuke provided cover fire with a sniper rifle. Ann wasn’t any good at aiming, so she sprayed bullets from a machine gun that Ryuji prayed wouldn’t hit him as he got close and personal with something badass—a shotgun, maybe, or a revolver. It switched off in his dreams until Ann shook him awake, the train car suddenly more crowded than before, Futaba and the others waiting on the station platform.

He scrambled out of his seat, tugging Ann along. Once they were out in the station, he could smell the salt on the air.

Yuuki yawned. Futaba elbowed him for it, then yawned herself.

“Alright,” Wakaba said after she’d done a headcount, “let’s get going.”

They trudged along in their flip-flops and sneakers. Ryuji had wondered who else would be at the beach right at opening time, and the answer turned out to be nearly everyone who lived close by: the place was packed with families and groups like theirs scouring the beach for good spots, sunhats blinding and sunglasses glinting and giant umbrellas popping open like fireworks. He couldn’t believe it was this sunny at only seven; he couldn’t believe the sky was so clear and the sea was so vast, when right next to him was a bustling sea town. Two hours ago he’d been in Tokyo stumbling through the dark streets in a sleepy daze, and now he was here.

Beside him, Ann started giggling.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, it’s just the dopey grin on your face,” she said. “If you’re this happy, maybe you should live here.”

“You think so?”

Ryuji tried to imagine it: running beside the sea every morning, the air clear except for the sharp taste of brine; fresh fish everyday if he wanted it; the idea that, for once, he’d be in a place where no one knew he was the screwup son of a deadbeat dad.

But instead he got caught on thoughts of tourists, of dodging metal detectors on his runs, of the stink of fish seeping into his clothes. Tsunamis hit the coasts pretty hard, and there wouldn’t be late night ramen shops or cheap gyms. Ryuji would have to relearn the streets of an entire town if he wanted to live here comfortably; Ryuji didn’t even know what kind of work there was out here. Marine biology? Fishing?

Not really his thing, honestly.

“Nah,” he decided. “But it’s nice, ain’t it? Getting out of Tokyo for a bit?”

“Tokyo isn’t nearly as bad as LA, but yeah, I get that,” Ann said.

Wakaba had picked a nearby free beach to use, but she warned them that the lockers and showers had a fee and usually only gave you cold water. You were lucky to get lukewarm water if you were the only one there, but that was so rare the odds were astronomical; Ryuji nodded along with the others, let go of Ann’s hand, and headed into the men’s changing room.

The price of the lockers wasn’t that expensive, but Yuuki paid for the three of them, and Ryuji took note of it, like he always did. Sometimes Yuuki didn’t have the cash to pay for shit—that didn’t bother Ryuji one bit—but it ate at him, knowing that he wasn’t making a dent in paying Ryuji back.

If Ryuji missed the money his monthly payments were going to, well, he never said anything.

They got their keys and headed to the banks of lockers. Ryuji’s was the one in the middle, which meant he got to see Yusuke stare at the wall of showers on their right while they changed. When he tugged on a hoodie, Ryuji nearly gaped at him. “Dude,” he said, tugging on a sleeve. “What’s this for?”

“I burn rather easily,” Yusuke said. He made the mistake of turning his head too far to answer, and quickly looked away. “I know that no amount of sunscreen is adequate to prevent it, thus, I will simply endure.”

“It’s breathable, right?”

“It is, yes,” Yusuke assured him. “If that is all, I will wait outside.”

Without waiting for Ryuji’s “Yeah, okay,” he grabbed up his bag and left. Ryuji shut his locker for him and pocketed the key, wondering if there was any room in Yusuke’s bag for it, or whether it would get lost among all of the art supplies he had to keep in there. The thing was like a void.

When he went back to his locker to stuff his shirt inside, he caught Yuuki staring at the changing room entrance, one hand up by his bare collarbone, a finger running across his skin.

(Ryuji, for a second, took some pride in the bunching of muscles under Yuuki’s skin. He wasn’t jacked by any means, but he wasn’t scrawny, anymore. Maybe that was why Yusuke looked like he’d swallowed a lemon before running out the door.

But maybe not. Maybe just changing in front of the guy he liked was too much.)

“What’s up, Yuuki?” Ryuji asked.

Yuuki started, then gave a dry laugh and a too-quick smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Oh, it just—feels different. That’s all. I didn’t want them to get lost, so I left them at home.”

The rings, right. Considering how expensive they were, Ryuji wouldn’t want them to get lost, either; but that couldn’t be all of it. That wasn’t the cause of the weird expressions flitting around on his face, like he was watching his dog get hit by a truck over and over again. Pain, and regret, and something broken—

Ryuji put a hand on his shoulder, and Yuuki gasped at the touch. Yuuki was just as warm as Ann, and his bones were just as fine, but there was one difference between her and Yuuki that Ryuji hadn’t been willing to give much thought to: that while Ann was strong, Yuuki—

Yuuki was weak.

How weak he was seemed to fluctuate—Ryuji knew he’d been bad during Kamoshida’s reign at Shujin. Ryuji had seen the utter hopelessness in the eyes of every single volleyball player, that simple despair that took a man and swallowed him whole without a second’s thought. But Ryuji also knew that he’d come back from his lunch breaks looking better—or that when they met up at the rehab center, he’d be a bit more on the cheerful side, even if he barely said a word. Ryuji had chalked it up to being out from under Kamoshida’s thumb, but that hadn’t been it—it had been Akira, pulling Yuuki up out of that despair, even for only minutes at a time.

He’d said so, hadn’t he?

Ryuji felt him now, warm and alive and quaking under some silent pressure. Whatever it was, Yuuki would tell him when he was ready to. Ryuji couldn’t push that.

“You know I’m here if you wanna talk, right?” Ryuji asked, just in case Yuuki had gotten it into his head that he wasn’t wanted. It sounded like the stupidest thing in the world to think about, but it happened, and Ryuji wasn’t going to try and understand it anymore.

He didn’t need to understand to be supportive. He didn’t need to understand to let his friends vent.

Yuuki looked at him, expression wavering—but then it locked up again, even as he smiled and said, “Yeah, I know.”

“Good,” Ryuji said, at a loss for anything else. At some point in the future Yuuki would talk to him—he just hoped that it wouldn’t be too late by then, that they wouldn’t be left with another Shiho.

Ryuji didn’t wish that on anybody.

Yuuki shut his locker and twisted the key. “Mind helping me put on some sunscreen?”

“I dunno,” Ryuji said, finally taking his hand back. “You sure you don’t burn like Yusuke does?”

“Kamoshida made us run laps of the school,” Yuuki said. “If I didn’t burn then, I don’t think I’m going to burn now.”

“You sure you just didn’t notice?”

“I’m—uh,” Yuuki said, frowning at his locker. “Maybe at first I did? And then later I didn’t, and by then everything just hurt anyway, so maybe I was overlooking it?”

“Maybe,” Ryuji said. “Look, I was joking. I’ll help you out, don’t worry.”

Yuuki sighed. “Thanks.”

If he realized that Ryuji meant with anything, not just sunscreen, he didn’t mention it.

Ryuji locked up, grabbed his bag, and slung an arm around Yuuki’s shoulders. He was warm, and alive, and like this Ryuji couldn’t see his face. He could pretend that his best friend wasn’t a nervous wreck one wrong decision or bad day away from throwing in the towel.

He just hoped Yuuki would come to him, if it ever came to that.

* * *

Yuuki collapsed onto a towel, still wet from the sea. Ann and Ryuji, somewhere behind him, were making plans to walk a bit of the boardwalk while Futaba and Wakaba got lunch. He assured them for the dozenth time that he was fine staying behind to watch everyone’s things—his own lunch was sitting in his bag, besides Yusuke’s sizable pile of seashells and pebbles and seaglass. Yusuke was off collecting more, which left Yuuki and Suzui by themselves.

He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t even know if she wanted to talk to him. Probably not; if anyone had done what he’d done to her, he wouldn’t want to talk to them, either.

Besides, what was he supposed to say? That he was glad she could walk again, even if it was with an odd, disjointed gait? That he was glad she had to live with the scars on her skin from the surgeries to fix her bones? That he was glad people took the opportunity to stare at her?

She touched one, running her thumb along the thick edge of it. They had to hurt, sometimes, when it rained or got cold out, and she had to be tired of it.

“Hey, Mishima,” she said, quietly enough that it was almost lost under the distant roar of the sea. Her phone was propped up on a leg, and the screen glowed under the shade of the umbrella. “Are you thirsty? Ann says she’ll bring something back for us.”

There was a vending machine by the changing rooms, but using it would require fetching his wallet out of his locker, and Yuuki wasn’t up to wandering in there on his own. He’d managed to avoid doing so at Protein Lovers only because Ryuji never let him out of his sight, and while it shouldn’t have been such a big deal…

He didn’t want to risk it. He might find musclebound meatheads like Kamoshida in there who smiled in just the right way to send him into a panic, and he knew that Futaba would call off her beach day to get him home.

(He also didn’t want to see more than he wanted to. In that changing room he’d be surrounded by men in various states of undress, and Yuuki was already having problems with dimple-cheeked Yamada. He did not want problems with anyone else.)

There were drinks in his bag, but they were either empty or warm, and he wanted nothing more than to cool off, to sink his head into a bucket of ice water until he remembered what was important instead of obsessing over damn fucking Yamada and his perfect teeth.

“Uh, just some water,” he said, trying to drown the thought of fucking Yamada on both a figurative and literal level—something that was difficult as he dried out in the sun. Something was wrong with him. Maybe it was the sun, the heat. Maybe it was the lack of Akira. “If, uh, that’s okay.”

“Water, got it,” Suzui said, typing out a response. Then she laughed. “You know, I still can’t believe Ann is dating.”

“Neither can I,” Yuuki admitted. It felt weird, looking at Ann and Ryuji holding hands on the train, so he’d closed his eyes and pretended it wasn’t happening and fallen asleep. It felt weird, being jealous of his best friend’s new relationship. Yuuki never thought he was so petty as to wish someone the unfortunate circumstance of not being able to hold hands with the love of their life.

Yuuki never thought he was so petty as to wish that no one else could have it if he couldn’t.

“Well, hopefully he’ll help Ann out. She’s been cutting back and watching what she’s eating, she’s been working out with some videos online—she says she wants to be serious as a model.” She gave another short laugh. “I guess the ones in America gave her a scare.”

He’d never seen a model from America, so he wouldn’t know. He could look it up later, much later, when all thoughts of Yamada and his stupid damn mixer were going to keep him awake.

He said, “I can’t imagine Ann being scared of much.”

“She’s not.” Suzui smiled, sad and wistful, and gazed out at the beach full of people. “She’s never scared of what might happen to her—just what might happen to others. If she thought or was told her parent’s reputation in the fashion world would take a hit because of her, she’d step up. Ann doesn’t quit. It’s not in her to.”

She was like Akira, then. The world was probably full of people like Akira and Ann, slowly being silenced and kicked down because they caused trouble or could cause trouble for the people they loved.

Love made everyone a fool—even nobodies like Yuuki hoped and grasped for it, knowing it was as far out of their reach as the stars. Only the ones who could throw it away in pursuit of what they wanted would ever attain anything.

Yuuki was not one of those people. Not anymore, not after Akira.

“Doesn’t she have any other dreams?” he asked. “She can’t really want to be a model for the rest of her life.”

Yuuki was sure he’d never heard of a model older than thirty—or maybe it was just that they all looked deceptively young, like actors did. Ann in ten years might look the same as she did now. Yuuki had to wonder if he’d be stockier by then, the way his dad was. If his shoulders ever decided to be broader, maybe then he’d fill out—but probably not.

“An actress, I think, or a fashion designer,” Suzui said, still wearing that smile, though it was crossing over into amused. “She switches between the two. I don’t want to make fun of her too much when she’s taking acting lessons and learning how to sew in her spare time.”

“Oh,” he said.

Of course Ann Takamaki—with her rich parents who loved her enough to drag her out of the country for a year—would have the means to take acting lessons and sewing classes. Of course she would have looked for something to do in her abundant free time, since the rest of them were so busy with school and work. And of course she was still studying to get into a university here in Japan to boot.

Meanwhile Yuuki had bought that first coding textbook with his pocket money. He’d stayed up late to read it over and over and practice on his beat-up old laptop, and still managed to drag himself to school in the morning. And afterwards… he hadn’t accomplished much. Akira had gone through a rather endearing phase of teaching Yuuki everything he knew, from cooking and sewing (though Yuuki was awful at the former and passable at the latter) to attempting to explain the intricacies of Ra Cielan trons and the subtle weave of the language that let him speak to Arsene. It had all been very confusing, and Yuuki would be lying if he said he hadn’t zoned out or fell asleep during some of them.

His stomach growled; he dug his lunch out of his bag, hoping the summer heat had warmed it up to a decent temperature, then dug into the tub of Boss’s curry.

Suzui laughed at him. “Curry, Mishima? On the beach?”

“I need to watch my spending,” he told her, wishing the summer heat had done something for the rice. It was grainy and stuck to his teeth, but there was nothing he could do about it.

“Is it hard?” she asked. “Living on your own, I mean.”

“My dad helps with the bills,” he admitted. Hirotaka paid at least half of the rent and utilities, and Yuuki sometimes walked in to groceries stacked in his fridge, with a few tubs of Boss’s curry missing to make room. He didn’t mind that Hirotaka had a key—he just wished that his dad would stick around if he was desperate for father-son time.

Hirotaka also helped with his tuition. Maybe Yuuki had no reason to be miffed at Ann after all; he just couldn’t believe that her dreams were so lofty when she had next to no experience with either of them.

But that was why they were dreams, right? Because they were lofty and potentially unattainable?

He swallowed. Lukewarm curry traveled a slow, cold trail down his throat. “Um, other than that, it’s not much different than living at home used to be. It just costs more, that’s all.”

“Oh,” Suzui said. She stuck her legs out to dig her toes into the sun-warmed sand beside her; her feet were pale, her veins painting rivers across an acrid desert.

Akira, he thought, wouldn’t have feet that pale. Akira would live to feel the kiss of the sun on his skin, and he would drag Yuuki into whatever he wanted; Yuuki would never say no, not to Akira, unlike some of the people on his forum. They were so cold, treating the app like it was just a game, trying to find the ways that tested Akira’s patience with the faceless stranger on the other side of the screen.

They lost when they pushed it, and then they had the nerve to cry about it.

Yuuki shook his head, dispelling any more thoughts of Akira and his faceless helpers and the app. He was supposed to be enjoying his beach trip—when was the last time he had come to the beach? Elementary school?—and thoughts of all of that had him wishing he was back in his apartment on his laptop, listening to the neighbor’s kid stomp around upstairs.

“Well, it’s not all that bad,” he said, remembering the feeling of her hands on his neck, the warm clamminess of another human being clinging to him. “There’s this kid in the apartment above me—she can’t be more than two or three, but I see her helping her mom garden some days when I get back from school.”

He looked down into his curry, wishing he had just a couple hundred yen to buy a soda or some takoyaki from the boardwalk to make it bearable. He wasn’t sure if admitting the rest was worth it—but this was Suzui, who he hoped wouldn’t judge. “She, uh, really likes giving hugs.”

“Does she?” Suzui grinned. “That sounds adorable! You’re so lucky.”

He wasn’t entirely sure what was so lucky about questionable, sticky toddler hands, or the few days she had a tiny watering can and wound up dumping water down his back—but maybe Suzui was talking about the hug part, and not the kid part.

“I’ve been volunteering at a daycare near my university,” she went on, “but the kids there aren’t nearly as cute! Most of them don’t like it when I try to help them, and even when I walk in the room they’ll try to hide or ignore me. I wind up doing menial tasks in the back most of the time.”

So it was the hug part, then. “I’m sure they’ll warm up to you in no time,” he said.

“I hope so,” she said, stretching her legs farther out. Then she checked her phone, frowned, and said, “Kitagawa should’ve been back by now. Do you think he got lost?”

“Probably,” he said, “although he might’ve just found some tidal pools or joined some kids in making a sand castle.”

Together, they locked eyes on Yusuke’s bag and its pile of sea debris. His phone was in there. The spare water he’d brought was in there.

Yuuki felt the thought hit him at the same time it hit Suzui: Yusuke Kitagawa, in his impractical summer hoodie, could be dying of heatstroke on the beach, and they would never know. Maybe he’d found some rocky formation, tried to climb it, and gotten hurt.

Suzui jumped to her feet, stumbling a bit before righting herself. “I’ll go find him,” she said, phone now in a death grip in her hand. Yuuki nodded along, even as she went on to say, “Give me your number and I’ll let you know if I see him. You tell me the same, okay?”

“Uh, sure,” he said, vaguely aware that Yusuke might also have crawled under the boardwalk for the shade. He dragged his phone out of his bag, ignored his shaking hands, and traded numbers with Suzui.

Then she darted off, feet more sure on the sand than he’d seen them before at the rehab center. His cold sludge of leftover curry was set aside, forgotten against the heavy feeling in his gut. Yusuke could have stopped to talk to someone. Someone could have stopped him to flirt or tease him for his hoodie or to ask him to take their picture—a task that Yuuki knew would take hours as Yusuke tried to make it as perfect as he could.

Anything could have happened, and Yuuki banished thoughts of another disappearance from his mind.

Anything could have happened, but that would be the worst.

* * *

Suzui was panting by the time she found Yusuke instructing a pair of children in the best way to decorate their sandcastle. He thought he was doing well, holding back every outburst against an improperly placed seashell or twig, and the children were enjoying his insight, which was rare enough.

Not many people cared for his artistic insight, after all.

But he held himself back regardless, and the result was a lopsided castle: one side was beginning to collapse under the weight of the shells, while the other stood tall, the spare twigs and small pebbles in neat rows. It was not something he would have come up with himself; it was not something Madarame would have wanted attributed to his illustrious name, and Yusuke found the design freeing, in a way.

He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t planned out every brushstroke, every pass of the pencil, every hue and shade of paint. He couldn’t remember the last time he had simply let his hands work, instead of controlling them with carefully thought out plans.

So, when Suzui stood there, panting in the heat with her legs quivering like a newborn fawn’s, he only asked, “What do you think?”

She took in the sandcastle, the older brother collecting up the pails and shovels, the little sister gawking at Suzui’s scars. “Did you die?” the sister blurted out, eyes wide.

“Manami!” her mother called out, appalled. She hurried over, gathered her daughter up, and started bowing. “I’m so sorry! She’s three, she doesn’t know what not to say sometimes.”

“Oh, I,” Suzui said, a bit startled by the commotion. Maybe she was still processing the question. It had been rather out of the blue, after all. “It’s fine. I’m still alive, so I didn’t die, Manami.”

Although she _had_ been trying to die, but that was probably a topic unsuitable with children around. Manami wouldn’t understand it, and Yusuke wondered if her brother would. He stared so seriously at Suzui’s scars Yusuke couldn’t help but wish to drag her away from them all, with their prying eyes and their loose tongues.

Suzui must have noticed, because she took it one step further, posing like one of Futaba’s Featherman figurines: “I’ll endure anything to keep the Earth safe from evil!”

Manami squealed, her brother gasped, eyes lighting up with recognition, and their mother’s smile turned a bit strained. She bowed again, took hold of her son, and tugged him away, even as he peered over his shoulder at Suzui and Yusuke in awe.

Suzui waved as they left. Yusuke looked back to the sandcastle to watch one side collapse into a mess of sand and shells, glad that he’d shoved his most favorite finds into his pocket beforehand.

Then her legs buckled. Suzui fell to her knees, and Yusuke kicked over what was left of the castle to get to her; her face was drawn and pale, her jaw clenched in pain.

Two years and she still couldn’t walk as she once did. Two years and countless scars and questioning stares everywhere she went, and Suzui could do nothing but grin and bear it, as she struggled to do now. “I’m fine,” she insisted, though her voice was weak. “I just shouldn’t have run, that’s all. I’ll be fine if I rest for a bit.”

“Is that so?” he asked. People, as they were wont to do, were staring. He scraped up sand, picking twigs and shells out of it. “Then, let us do something while we wait. Help me build a castle.”

“A sandcastle?”

“What else?” He handed her the bits and pieces of debris from the last castle; Suzui took everything with a puzzled expression, then began laying them out. “And what, exactly, brought you here in such a hurry?”

“We were worried when you didn’t come back,” she said, suddenly remembering the phone in her hand. A few button presses later and he was hearing, “Mishima? I found him, he’s fine.”

Yusuke imagined a rush of relief running through Yuuki’s body from the drawn-out sigh he could hear from the phone. It was odd, he thought, because if anyone had the right to become so worried when he disappeared, it would be Yusuke if Yuuki did. His heart would stop beating out of sheer panic, he was sure of it.

“Okay,” Suzui was saying, “alright. We might be a little while longer, but if Ann and Sakamoto are back, can you bring some water? And some more sunscreen?”

Yusuke scraped up more sand, determined to make a castle that would put his artistic sensibilities to good use. Sand was certainly a new medium, but it couldn’t be much different than clay, in the end.

(Yusuke had never been to the beach. Madarame had promised him a summer trip, once, but then the expenses had piled up and they no longer had the funds for it. Yusuke knew now that it had been a lie, the trip and the excuse; Yusuke knew now that Madarame had wanted nothing more of him than the paintings he produced.

Yusuke had been six. It had been the last time he had asked for anything from the man he had called a father.)

But it was, he was finding. Clay had shape until one pulled it apart; sand, on the other hand, was millions of fine grains sticking together only through the intervention of water. They were gritty on his knees and hands, dozens upon hundreds of them catching on his skin.

He did not mind that, but it turned out sand was a very difficult sculpting material. If he tried to make archways, they fell apart in the middle, leaving only columns. If he tried to make towers, they collapsed under their sheer weight.

It was frustrating. It was aggravating.

It was, somehow, everything Madarame would hate: a medium that he could not control, could not take advantage of, could not profit from.

Yusuke loved it. At the same time he decided this, he smashed another collapsed tower down, one eye beginning to twitch. His temple throbbed. Over the mess, someone gave him a water bottle.

“Come on, you need to drink something,” Yuuki said, and Yusuke—

Yusuke couldn’t look at him. That brief glance up to his face was too much—there was so much skin, the tan of his arms and legs giving way to the paleness of his chest, his thighs—

Yusuke took the bottle, sat back, and tried not to mind the sand that got in his mouth as he drank. He watched the sea, could see the look on Yuuki’s face as he turned to Suzui when she asked for help with the sunscreen. She wanted to get her back; Yuuki didn’t want—wouldn’t or couldn’t bring himself—to touch her. He looked at her scars the way Yusuke sometimes looked at canvases: as if the world had ended and it had all begun there, with a splotch of paint or a broken body.

But, like Yusuke, he did. He splayed a hand across her back, smearing on the sunscreen, flinching whenever he traced the upper curve of one of her scars.

“It’s not your fault, Mishima,” she said, quietly enough that Yusuke shouldn’t have heard it.

“It is my fault,” Yuuki argued.

“It’s not. It’s no one’s fault but his; if he were your dad, and we were siblings, Mishima, you would have done the same. You did what he told you because you were afraid. I did what he wanted because I was afraid, too. I didn’t have to go. I didn’t have to listen to you. But I did, and it’s no one’s fault but his.”

Yuuki’s hand lifted, going for his collarbone. Yusuke took a moment to appreciate the muscles of his back as it twisted. They were fine muscles on a fine body, and Yusuke wished for time to freeze, so he could relish the moment for just a bit longer.

Instead, Yuuki said, “I should have been braver.”

Yusuke pulled his hood back and dumped the rest of the water on his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the stream. He could have run off to the ocean, but that would require standing, and there were children around.

Death wasn’t the only thing they failed to grasp fully, after all.

“And he,” Suzui said, with a tone of finality, “should have been a proper teacher. I’d like it very much if you’d just… stop blaming yourself. I don’t blame you, Mishima. I didn’t then, and I don’t now, and I know you know that. So, just, please. Stop.”

Yuuki laughed, a short thing that could have been a cry of pain. “No, you don’t get it. It’s my fault, because—because if it wasn’t for my boyfriend, I would have jumped before you did. If he hadn’t been there for me, I would have done it, and none of—of anything that happened would have happened. None of it. So, it’s my fault. Because I couldn’t, and then you had to.”

“That’s not the point,” Suzui said, sharp and cutting as a knife. Her hands balled into fists on her lap, and Yusuke was surprised to see her glaring at Yuuki over her shoulder. Most people liked to duck their heads and avoid having to look at anyone else while delivering bad or unwanted news, but Suzui kept her head high and stared and Yuuki froze under the weight of her gaze. She was, somehow, not even yelling. “That’s not the point at all, Mishima. The point is that he should have been a better teacher, so neither of us would have wound up even contemplating it. Understand?”

“I, uh…”

Yusuke thought he understood Yuuki’s hesitation. Kamoshida would always be the awful, terrible man he’d been to Yuuki, and no amount of wishing, daydreaming, or contemplating other universes where he was better, kinder, more of what he should have been and less of what he was. The same was true of Madarame: Yusuke had long since outgrown any fantasies of having an actual father figure, and there was no place in his world for one. If no one had come forth after the death of his mother, then Yusuke was truly and utterly without a shred of family.

That had never stopped him from wishing for a father. That had never stopped him from wishing that Madarame would buy more food that month, or a new shirt Yusuke to replace the one he had outgrown.

Yusuke hadn’t been beaten, but it was the same, in the end: abandonment of duty, a refusal to provide.

“Yeah,” Yuuki eventually said, folding under the weight of her expectation.

She still gave him a skeptical look. “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said, much quicker this time. He touched his collarbone, where his rings would usually rest, and traced a circle there.

He had to be thinking of Akira, of course, and Akira could say much the same as the rest of them: if not for a scheming politician and if not for another dimension’s greed, where would he be?

Yusuke couldn’t even contemplate it. Akira, somewhere out in the world, without even an inkling of Yuuki’s existence? It was just as unfathomable as Yusuke being unaware of Yuuki’s, and Yusuke’s heart lurched at the thought of never knowing love.

Even if it was slowly driving him insane.

“As long as you do,” Suzui said after a time, and got up slowly. “So no more thinking it was your fault, understand?”

“Okay,” Yuuki said. Whether he believed it or not—whether he was saying it only to placate Suzui or not—he said it, though Yusuke could hear the slight tinge of doubt there, as if he would never fully believe it. Yusuke knew that feeling all too well.

Suzui and Yuuki both looked to him then. Right, they’d been worried enough to come and find him on a beach this large, and the bag Yuuki had dropped looked pleasantly full.

“Is there more water?” Yusuke asked, and traded his empty bottle for a full one. He sipped at it on their way back to the others, hunger a familiar, yawning hole in his gut made worse by the smell of food all around him: takoyaki and hot dogs, burgers and yakisoba. There were kids eating ice cream and chocolate-covered bananas and licking the mess from their fingers.

No wonder Madarame hadn’t wanted to bring him here, when he’d been pretending that they were poor, that every meal was a gift, that every painting that was given to him was given back to them in the form of food.

Food had been a luxury. It was less so now, but the sight of it all around him made him want to try everything he could get his hands on, even though there was food in his bag and in the cupboards at home. He wanted everything simply because he could have it, now.

Instead, he gulped down water. Eating just because he could was exactly the sort of behavior he was supposed to avoid. Three meals and the occasional snack and water, though he enjoyed tea and coffee, too.

Suzui must have glanced back at him as he eyed what everyone was eating. “Makes you hungry, doesn’t it?”

“It does,” he said. It felt wonderful to admit it.

What was not so wonderful was the board game Futaba had spread out over their towels.

“We told her not to,” Ryuji said, despite fiddling with a game piece. Ann held a red tiger and grinned at them, the last lone piece waiting on the board. Yusuke ignored it, going for his bag and the food therein, but Yuuki sat and picked up the ox.

“We gotta let our food settle, right?” Futaba said. “Just sitting around is boring, so let’s play for a while!”

“She says that,” Ryuji said, as Suzui took a seat beside Ann and read over the rules, “but she lost at nearly everything last time.”

“‘Last time?’” Wakaba questioned, looking up from her book.

“Yeah, last time,” Ryuji said. “I mean, it’d be pretty sad if ‘taba never played a board game in her life, right?”

“Oh,” Wakaba said, and Yusuke wondered what the look on her face meant. That she was embarrassed to be the cause of something so trivial? That she couldn’t believe her daughter had never done anything so simple?

“I’d never played, either,” Yusuke reminded him.

“Yeah, you hadn’t.” Ryuji grinned. Yusuke dug into his curry, wishing for a microwave. “Good thing none of us knew the rules, huh?”

“But I’ll win this time!” Futaba declared, brandishing her elephant. “Just you watch! I’m a new and improved Futaba Isshiki, understand?”

Ryuji laughed, and grinned. Yuuki laughed, and placed one hand at his collarbone. Suzui leaned on Ann for support as she picked up the dice and tossed them.

It would make a wonderful painting, Yusuke thought. A board game at the beach, the sun and the shade, the lively expressions on his friend’s faces… if only Yusuke could capture it properly. If only he could do it the justice it deserved.

As he was, he wouldn’t be able to. Not when painting still felt like he was missing a step on the stairs, barely catching himself when the weightlessness hit his stomach. Not like this.

But one day, he hoped, and one day soon.

* * *

Futaba very nearly collapsed on their way home.

She had never been out an entire day before, sitting in the sun and learning what it must be like to be inside an oven. Her skin felt raw.

Wakaba was sure she had a sunburn. Futaba was sure it would be the first sunburn of her entire life.

She sure had lots of firsts, lately. First friends, first therapist, first sleepover—and with _boys_ ; her mom might die if she ever found out—first trip to the beach, because Wakaba had never taken her before. Kana was the first person she’d ever fought with.

Kana was the first person to ever sleep over at her house.

… Kana was the first person to tell her that not everybody wanted Medjed’s justice. Which wasn’t wrong, but usually the only ones who said Medjed was evil and a nuisance and a pox on society or some lame junk like that were the bad guys, the crooks and the thieves and the people who liked to take advantage of others.

Kana didn’t get that, and Futaba wasn’t ready to see her. Not after nearly beating monkey-boy at Pashishi, not after building sandcastles with Inari, not after tossing a big beach ball around with Takani while her friend and Nishima sat off to the side looking green. Inari had taken the chance to sketch the ocean; monkey-boy had taken the chance to see if he could run the whole boardwalk.

Spoiler: he couldn’t. But he hadn’t been upset by that; he’d come back grinning and sheepish and already making plans to be able to do it next year.

Next year. A year ago Futaba would have wondered if she’d be able to make it to next year, much less the year after and all the years after that. Futaba hadn’t been sure of a lot of things back then, but that had been the biggest one, and now…

Now she thought she could, even if walking down the Yongen alleys filled her with anticipation. She didn’t want to fight with Kana anymore. She didn’t want to fight, period; it proved just how different she still was from everyone else.

Although she did have to wonder how many people wouldn’t be willing to turn their criminal parents in. Kana knew that what she was being forced to do was wrong, but she wasn’t willing to do anything to change that, which made zero sense. None.

“Looks like Sojiro stayed up for us,” Wakaba said as they neared the house. The lights in the kitchen were on, though it was way past Leblanc’s closing time and—Futaba checked her phone, just to be sure—way past the time Sojiro would pretend to go to bed just to sit around at the table double-checking his finances.

The nerve of him, not to believe in her math!

But she was too tired to really care. Getting up so early so late into her vacation was like fighting a boss at half HP, and now that it was all over she felt drained, and her scalp still itched from the salt she hadn’t managed to wash out of it. She was sure she would be tracking sand around the house for the next week or so.

“We’re back,” her mom called as they stepped inside. Futaba managed to start saying it, but yawned halfway through, stumbling as she toed her sandals off. Their bags hit the floor, and Futaba almost let hers drag her down with it.

“Hey,” Sojiro said, still in the kitchen. “We’re in here. Kana wanted to share something with us.”

“It’s awfully late for this,” Wakaba said.

Futaba could hear him shrug. “She said she wanted to say it today.”

Futaba managed to nod, squinting at her mom as she looked her over. Finally Wakaba sighed in defeat. “Alright. As long as it doesn’t take too long.”

Futaba sure hoped not; any longer and her eyelids might glue themselves shut. Wakaba yawned herself as they went in and found seats, and for once Sojiro’s kitchen looked full. Almost cramped, with the tiny table finally holding four people. Someone had set out glasses of water, and Futaba snatched hers up and sipped at it, not wanting to look too much at Kana.

After the other day, Futaba had an idea of what Kana wanted to say.

“I, um,” Kana started, keeping her eyes glued to the table, “I wanted to tell Isshiki—Futaba—that I’m sorry for what I said before.”

Or not.

“I shouldn’t have called you a freak just because you’re different. And—and you’re helping me, too, even though it must have been hard just to say anything at all. You never were the talkative type. Never the kind of person to start a conversation. But you did that for me and I’m happy you did.”

And then, with a smile shot to Futaba, she started laying it out: the pictures, her parents, their clients. The new, brand-name purse her mom had bought that cost more than Kana’s tuition for six months. Her dad’s gambling habits, and how he could leave the house with nearly a million yen in his wallet and come back broke. How at first she didn’t mind a few pictures because they made her feel pretty and wanted, but she hadn’t known her parents would start selling them, hadn’t known how bad things would get.

“They don’t even work anymore,” she said softly at one point. Sojiro had gotten up by then and was pacing his kitchen, from one wall to another, one hand up by his mouth as if holding an imaginary cigarette, even though he was supposed to be quitting. A deep furrow had dug its way across his brow. “They just stay home and buy outfits for me to wear in the next set of pictures, then go out and spend whatever they’ve earned. I’d say I’m surprised the bills are still getting paid, but if the neighbors found out…”

They’d gossip, Futaba knew. Like hens in a henhouse, jabbering on and on about how dear Kana’s mom could afford that purse but not tuition, or how Kana’s dad could go out to the pachinko or mahjong parlor every week but not keep the lights on in his own house.

“I don’t know why they did it,” Kana said. Wakaba handed her another tissue, and Kana wiped away tears and snot and a bit of drool. “I don’t know why it started. Maybe it was just a one-time thing, like a picture they submitted to a magazine won a prize. I don’t know. But they used to be good people; we used to go to the park and feed the ducks, and we used to have dinner together every night, and they came to everything at school and looked so proud. I don’t want them to go to jail. I just want my parents back.”

Sojiro stopped in front of the sink, staring at the window. His wrinkles seemed even deeper than ever, and Futaba realized with a sudden jolt that it was her fault for bringing Kana here. Futaba always caused him problems, even when she was trying for solutions.

“Kana,” Wakaba said, when Kana’s crying had died down, “you aren’t going to like what I’m going to say, understand?”

Kana nodded.

“Kana, dear, I don’t think they’ve been your parents for a long time.” Wakaba laid one hand on Futaba’s on the table, and Futaba looked up at her. Wakaba had at least realized it, and they’d talked it over, and in the end Wakaba had listened to her own daughter and had decided to change, to be better. “Being one isn’t easy. But I’ve never, _never_ considered using Futaba as a way to earn myself money. I would never claim anything she came up with as my own, and I would never ask her to do these kinds of things, even if it was for a little extra money.”

“Wise old men say that parents should be self-sacrificing,” Sojiro piped up from the window. “That they should give their children more, even if it means winding up with less. But this is…”

He trailed off, shaking his head.

Futaba knew what he meant, even if Wakaba hadn’t been the perfect mom at first. Taking and taking and taking—and from their own kid, no less—and asking for more when the well began to run dry. Begging for it, as if Kana owed them anything other than an hour-long tirade on how shitty they were as parents before she stormed out of their lives forever.

“I watched some of Mr. Sakura’s movies while you were gone,” Kana said—Futaba knew which ones she was talking about, the sappy Christmas specials and the occasional newer DVD of sappy love stories and action flicks, although Sojiro never claimed they were his, exactly—and Wakaba nodded. “Those families—they’re so different from mine. They’re happy, even when everything goes wrong and they fight. They don’t expect anything from each other except good grades and good salaries. They’re—they’re good. They’re different.”

She sniffed. Wakaba passed her another tissue, and they spent a few minutes in silence, letting Kana think. Wakaba and Sojiro had to be cataloging their options, even if there wasn’t much they could do in the end. Futaba had her own list memorized by now, the various sites she’d have to use bookmarked in her mind, and definitely had hours and hours to go through with whatever Kana decided.

As long as it wasn’t to go back home, at least.

“They’re my parents,” Kana said again, more to herself as she ducked her head. “They’re my parents, but I’m tired of doing— _that_ —to make them happy. To make ends meet. I want to finish school and go to college and forget I ever had to do it when I make my own money the right way. But I can’t—I can’t just leave them like—”

“Leaving them won’t make you a bad daughter,” Sojiro told her. “You said it yourself: they’re trying to pull you out of school so you can make them money. This story is depressingly familiar, you know, and if I wanted to sock that old man back then, I’ll do the same for you too, kid.”

“Violence is wrong, Sojiro,” Wakaba said, but there was gleam in her eye that said she agreed, and it hardened when she went on, “And I don’t believe he was making his students strip naked and photographing them, or there would have been a whole different can of worms for the lawyers to deal with. Fraud and theft and fatal negligence was enough, I think.”

“Gross,” Futaba muttered, picturing Inari at seven or eight doing some of the poses Kana had been made to do over the years, and wearing even less because he was a boy—or maybe the old geezer would have gone for the androgynous angle and covered him up anyway.

Still, it was gross. Disgusting. Futaba enjoyed turning creeps like those in whenever she happened to find them, and found herself wishing she’d had the know-how to do so back in middle school. The whole mess could have been nipped in the bud—or maybe Kana’s parents would have just gotten more cautious.

It was hard to tell, and Futaba was tired.

Kana was shaking her head, though, and still crying. “They’re my parents. I love them, but I don’t want them to do anything like this anymore. I want to be a normal family again. I—I want to be a normal family, period.”

She took a deep, shuddering breath and forced out, “But I can’t have that, can I? They’re so used to doing things this way—they’re used to using me and lying about it—and they aren’t going to change just because I ask them to. They should have stopped before now, but they didn’t, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I want to be normal.”

She took a few seconds more, her jaw quivering. Whatever her decision was, Futaba needed to stick to it. Futaba needed to be better than Medjed right now, jumping the gun on every minor infraction she could find; if she wanted to count Kana as a friend, Futaba needed to give her space to make her own decisions and let her live with whatever consequences they brought.

Akira had taught her that. How mad he’d gotten—how angry he’d been—when he thought something had happened to Nishima and she had caused it. No one had ever been mad at her like that before.

No one had ever been so unwilling to forgive, either.

And it had all been because Futaba had thought she could crack the app and solve the mystery and be a hero—and she hadn’t. In Akira’s eyes she’d been nothing but a villain, shoving her nose in where it wasn’t wanted and didn’t belong.

“Please,” Kana eventually said, and though her voice quivered and quaked, there was steel there, hiding underneath it all. “If they’re not going to change—if there’s nothing I can do—please. I have to turn them in, don’t I?”

“Are you saying you want to turn them in?” Sojiro said.

“Yes,” Kana said. “Futaba said she can get the evidence to make it stick. I’ve trusted her this much, so I can trust her with a little more.”

Wakaba and Sojiro turned to look at her, then, and Futaba shrank under their combined gaze. Medjed hadn’t been a thing until after Wakaba left for America, and Sojiro had never asked what she did upstairs all day as long as she didn’t buy anything on his credit card without asking first.

It was Wakaba who said, “Putting aside the hows, I suppose it’s alright.”

“I can put it on a flashdrive,” Futaba mumbled. “We can say Kana brought it with her.”

“Will that be enough?”

“Who knows?” Sojiro said. “In this day and age, though, it might.”

Right, with all the lobbying and the arrests. Futaba hardly needed to do anything anymore; the police, it seemed, had every child exploiter and kidnapper locked up behind bars, and Kana’s parents weren’t going to be an exception to that rule. Not now, and not once she said she didn’t want to do it.

“Can we do it tomorrow?” Kana asked. “Before I chicken out and decide I don’t want to. Please.”

“Of course,” Wakaba said, acting like it might not be the end of Kana’s life as she knew it. Nothing for Kana would ever be the same, after tomorrow. Nothing would really be the same for Futaba, either.

“I’ll get started on the data,” Futaba said, hurrying out of her chair. She was still tired, but she could sleep when this was done; Futaba wasn’t about to make Kana wait even a minute longer than she had to, and chances were high Wakaba wanted to leave as early as possible, when Futaba might not be awake.

“We’ll talk about the hows later, Futaba,” Wakaba called to her as she retreated up the stairs.

She’d brought it on herself. Sojiro knew bits and pieces but not all of it. She wondered what her mom would think, though, of learning her daughter was an internationally wanted hacker. Would Wakaba turn her in? Would Wakaba even listen to Futaba’s explanation that _that_ Medjed was someone else posing as her?

She didn’t know. The only thing she did know was that Kana needed her now, and Futaba wasn’t about to disappoint.

She’d already let down too many people.


	13. Summer Vacation, Saturday

Yuuki paused in front of the station. Despite being as innocuous as always, he swore it had a different air to it now: a feeling of finality. It wasn’t too late to turn around, head back to his apartment, and read some more of that linguist’s posts on his forum that was attempting to deconstruct the Ra Cielan language.

His phone buzzed. Who was he kidding; it was too late to turn back the second he told Yamada he’d show. It had been too late the second Yamada latched onto him, months and months ago. Yuuki had always been bad at saying no and meaning it, and Yamada was just another person to add to the growing list of people Yuuki had eventually given in to. He was better at ignoring the things that bothered him until he couldn’t anymore.

He was really wishing some of that bravery Akira insisted he had had stuck around, now. What good was courage if it only showed up when it wanted to, and not when Yuuki needed it?

What good was courage, when he was answering Yamada’s latest text with **be there soon**?

He sighed. The only other message he’d gotten was a text from Ryuji with all the usual best friend bravado—that Ryuji would show up and cause a scene to get Yuuki out of there, if he needed it, among other things—and Yuuki wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. It was still new, having someone physical and real wanting to intervene on his behalf. It was still odd, thinking that someone had his back if things turned for the worse.

He hoped they wouldn’t. He hoped he’d manage to get away with sitting with the weird artist friend for ten minutes or so before calling it quits; he hoped no one there would be another Yamada, desperate to get him to join something-or-other even if he didn’t want to.

He really, really hoped not.

And if it turned out like that, well, he had texts to Hirotaka, Ryuji, and Futaba explaining exactly where he was going and what to do if he didn’t respond by morning—Hirotaka and Ryuji for obvious reasons, and Futaba’s was just so she wouldn’t have a reason to get mad at him again.

But it wouldn’t. He had to believe that, even if he kept thinking of all the ways this could go wrong.

(There was no way it was going to go right. Not if Yuuki followed through, and every time he thought of it, his stomach burned with shame. He was disgusting for even thinking about it; he’d be disgusting for following through with it.

There was just… no way it was going to go right.)

His phone buzzed. Yamada, _again_ , with about a dozen emojis telling Yuuki how excited he was that he was actually coming and reaffirming that promise that as long as Yuuki gave it a try, Yamada would help him leave whenever he wanted to.

Five or ten minutes was all he had to commit to. Five or ten minutes was shorter than the walk from the station to the venue; it was nothing compared to Kamoshida’s grueling practices and the schooldays sandwiched between them, where Yuuki’s body had ached so badly it was a wonder he never dropped dead there at his desk.

It was probably a good thing he hadn’t, or Akira wouldn’t have gotten the chance to come home. The thought of leaving him behind to wonder who he was and what he was supposed to be doing for the rest of eternity was enough to make Yuuki shudder, though it was possible Akira would have enough sheer force of will to wake himself up on his own.

That other dimension was too strange, Yuuki decided. At least he knew he was awake, here among the crush of Tokyo’s Saturday night travelers. At least he knew he wasn’t dreaming, as the heat of summer sunk in the air and made sweat trickle down his back.

The train cars would be air-conditioned. They’d be cool, even if they weren’t comfortable, and the longer he stood there waiting, the more sweat drenched his shirt, and then he’d be incredibly uncomfortable throughout the five or ten minutes of the mixer.

He shoved his phone back in his pocket and boarded the train, reservations be damned.

Five or ten minutes. That was all he had to give.

Yamada texted him over the train ride, reminders of where the venue was and that he was waiting outside and that there wouldn’t be any alcohol served. They technically had until ten to stay, if Yuuki felt like it, but the roiling in his gut told him no.

Five or ten minutes. It was just a party at some family diner with some classmates and the Venus of Shogi and her weird artist friend. Everything would be fine. All Yuuki had to do was keep his head down and pretend there was some emergency soon after it started so he could leave.

All too soon, he found himself in front of the diner. Yamada was busy talking to someone—his buddy, Yuuki guessed—but smiled and waved as Yuuki moved into view.

“You made it after all,” Yamada said.

“I said I would,” Yuuki reminded him.

“You did, you did,” Yamada laughed, then turned to his buddy. “This is Mishima from Website Design. Mishima, this is my buddy Hosoda. We’re in the same marketing class.”

“Ryo Hosoda, nice to meet you,” Hosoda said, giving a short bow that Yuuki returned. Hosoda was plump with a face that seemed to perpetually grin—but maybe that was just excitement, as he turned back to Yamada to say, “Man, I can’t believe it! _The_ Venus of Shogi! I think I’ll remember tonight for the rest of my life!”

And maybe it was just Yuuki’s imagination, but Yamada’s smile seemed to falter at that. He recovered quickly enough that Hosoda, still gushing and on the lookout, didn’t notice. “Maybe she’ll play a game or two.”

“You think so?”

“Hm, maybe,” was Yamada’s response. “Or, maybe she’ll want a break from shogi.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter! Whether she deigns to play a game or not, we’re being graced with the presence of a goddess! How are you not excited? I bet Mishima’s excited!”

“That’d be one way to put it,” Yuuki muttered, and over the din of the crowd heard Yamada laugh.

He just wanted to go home. Did the five minutes start when he arrived, or would they only start once he was inside?

“Not all of us are shogi fanatics,” Yamada said, “and you know, if you keep on like that, the other girls are going to get jealous.”

“They’ll be fine,” Hosoda said. “They’re, you know, normal. Average. Definitely not the Venus of—oh, there she is! Lady Togo, over here!”

Yuuki would be the first to admit that when Yamada had first mentioned the Venus of Shogi, he had no idea who that was. He’d been busy with Akira while her career was washed down the drain, but a few quick searches had helped him clear that up. Togo had not only been a prominent female shogi player but beautiful, too—and while the revelations that bribery had been her key to success had doomed her future there, she was still rather pretty. Even today, out of her high school uniform and in a checkered sundress, her hair done up in an elaborate array of braids and pins.

But what surprised him wasn’t how pretty Hifumi Togo was; what surprised him was her artist friend, brushing a lock of hair out of his face as they walked up. His nose was red, a leftover from the beach trip. Yuuki stared at him; Yusuke stared back, as surprised as Yuuki was.

“I told you, you don’t need to call me Lady,” Togo said.

“But that doesn’t even begin to convey how much respect I have for you, Lady Togo!” Hosoda exclaimed. “Starting over your shogi career, and after such humiliation—only one as dedicated to the art as you are could even dream of it!”

“I’d like to not talk about it,” Togo said. Both her face and Yusuke’s soured at nearly the same time; Hosoda backpedaled, shaking at the thought of his precious guest turning on her heel and walking away.

“Oh, yes! Of course not, silly me! And, ah, your friend here?”

“Yusuke Kitagawa,” Togo said, and he bowed just an inch or so too deep. It had to be nerves, because his face screamed a blank politeness Yuuki remembered seeing at the rehab center. “I told you this before, but we were classmates back in high school.”

“Oh, is that so?” Hosoda asked, as if he hadn’t told Yamada exactly that—and Yamada snickered, from his new spot next to Yuuki.

“Must’ve forgot in all the Venus excitement,” he muttered, just low enough for only Yuuki to hear.

Yuuki wasn’t sure how to feel about the surge that went through his system at that tone, or the slight wink that followed. Something was horribly wrong with him, if just a conversation was sending chills up his spine.

Hosoda reintroduced himself, and then Yamada took his turn, and when they all turned to Yuuki, the only thing he could think of to say was, “You really need to buy a new shirt.”

Because Yusuke—stupid Yusuke, who’d rather stock up on art supplies than food—was wearing a shirt that was clearly a size too small. A purple button-down with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to hide the fact that they didn’t reach his wrists, even as the fabric strained across his chest. “Do I?” Yusuke asked, running a hand over it. “I’d planned to, but I’m rather close to my budget this month.”

“Unbutton it,” Yuuki said.

“Must I?” he sighed.

“Yeah. It won’t look as bad, then.”

Yamada knocked into Yuuki’s arm as Yusuke sighed, again, but started on it—the gray t-shirt underneath was much better fitting, in Yuuki’s opinion—but whatever he was about to say was drowned out by Togo asking, “Is this a friend of yours, Yusuke?”

“Yes,” Yusuke said. “We’ve known each other for some time now.”

“I see,” Togo said, though it was clear she didn’t, not quite. Yuuki could practically hear the questions on the tip of her tongue, but Hosoda clapped his hands and announced they should head inside. Luckily for Togo, he seemed to get the hint to lead the way inside; unluckily for Yuuki, this somehow meant that Yamada was right behind him as they filed in and headed for the tables, and that somehow meant that Yusuke was seated at one end while Yuuki was, for some unfathomable reason, plunked right in between Hosoda and Yamada.

They went around the table introducing themselves, and Yuuki forgot nearly every name as he heard it. He’d learned his lesson and left the rings at home, but it left his hands with nothing to do other than grip his phone and pluck at a stray thread on his jeans. Some of them murmured at Yusuke’s introduction—he was the only art and education student among a near dozen of marketing, managing, and computer science majors—and there was a moment of shocked silence when it was Togo’s turn.

“So,” Yamada said into that silence, “let’s get this started!”

And if Yuuki thought he was uncomfortable, Togo looked even moreso as nearly everyone aside from Hosoda and Yusuke ignored her. Yuuki couldn’t even remember what she was studying—history, maybe, or literature—just that she stared down at the table most of the time until Hosoda, fed up with no one else being in awe of the Venus of Shogi gracing them with her presence, pulled a shogi board out of his bag and asked her for a match.

“But—are you sure?” she asked, even as the noise around them grew slightly worse. Yusuke winced and leaned away from the marketing major who was laughing a bit too loud at the joke his friend had made.

“Still not talking to anyone, huh,” Yamada said, right in Yuuki’s ear.

“Don’t do that,” Yuuki told him, and shifted away—and Hosoda was getting up, trading seats with Yusuke, Togo watching him go with something like defeat in her proud face. “Please,” he added.

“Sure, sure,” Yamada said. “How about you, Kitagawa? Not that interested in mingling?”

“It’s rather difficult to mingle while seated,” Yusuke said.

“You’re right,” Yamada said with a laugh. The dimples weren’t nearly as bad as Yuuki remembered them; maybe he was finally losing whatever odd interest he’d had. Maybe he was finally settling down—

Yamada’s leg bumped his under the table, and Yuuki threw that thought out the window.

But Yamada went on, not noticing or caring. “I’m surprised that you’re friends with Togo, honestly. Don’t tell me you used to play shogi, too.”

“Only a bit,” Yusuke admitted. “I was rusty when Togo invited me to play with her, and I thought it was a good way to—unwind, so to speak. Not that the company of my friends isn’t welcome, of course, but I was introduced to some of Kanda’s churches as a result. Beautiful places, if I may say so.”

“Huh, really,” Yamada said, with a distinct lack of disinterest that Yuuki could have heard from a mile away. “And Mishima here’s one of your friends?”

Yusuke went tense. Yuuki wondered what sort of politeness had been drilled into him to make him grit out, “Yes, he is,” despite his hands turning bloodless and white on the table.

“Relax, man,” Yamada said. “It’s just—I never see him talking to anybody, so it’s surprising.”

“I’m right here,” Yuuki reminded him.

“Yeah.” Yamada’s leg bumped his again, and this time Yuuki knew it was on purpose. “I know.”

Fucking _Yamada_. What was his deal? What did he want from Yuuki? Why did he keep doing things like this, when all Yuuki wanted was for him to stop?

Was this what it was like, out in the real world? Yuuki had been ignored so long that he’d forgotten what it felt like just to hug someone, and now Yamada—damn Yamada, with his dimples and his perfect teeth and his leg, warm and pressing—

“Well, if you’d like to continue talking,” Yusuke said, “I’d be more than happy to, but I’d prefer to switch seats. I’m not one to talk over other’s heads, and Yuuki likes to sit on the ends.”

Yuuki turned to stare at him. If anyone was the one who liked to sit on the end, it was Yusuke, since the space let him stretch his legs out. But Yusuke didn’t look at him, searching Yamada’s face for some kind of answer.

Whatever he was looking for, Yamada must have hidden it well. He bumped Yuuki’s leg again even as he said, “Oh, really? I didn’t know that. You should have said something, Mishima.”

“Uh, right,” Yuuki said. He didn’t mention that Yamada had nearly forced him into the seat. He didn’t mention that, aside from Yusuke’s at the end, the second Hosoda sat down Yuuki had had no choice. What sort of person complained about the seating arrangements, anyway?

Definitely not Yuuki.

Still, he got up and switched with Yusuke, who proceeded into a long and slightly boring monologue on the beauty of the Western arch and the history of stained glass as soon as he sat back down. Togo, at her end of the table, smiled lightly and nodded along at times—but everything else, Yuuki could tell, was going in one ear and out the other for everyone who didn’t make a habit of playing shogi in churches.

He checked his phone. The five minutes he’d been dreading enduring had somehow turned into twenty. Waitresses finally came out with appetizers and drinks, and Yuuki’s stomach unclenched at the smell of food. Greasy diner fare was better than nothing, and after a morning spent pacing his apartment with an appetite that wouldn’t even tolerate toast, Yuuki had to admit he was hungry.

Yuuki also had to admit that it was strange that Yusuke, after being so quiet, had broken out into talking Yamada’s ear off. He barely paused to sip at his water, and didn’t stop even when loading his small plate before passing it over to Yuuki.

Something was definitely weird. Yuuki just wished he knew what; did it have to do with Yamada taking zero interest in Togo’s friend all the while grilling him for info about Yuuki, or did it have to do with how Yusuke was clearly presenting himself as an obstacle?

Suddenly Yuuki’s—not quite brilliant, and in fact downright idiotic—plan seemed to have a million holes in it. He’d thought it all over, too, all the what-ifs and the supposes, and he’d thought he was ready for whatever happened as a result.

He wasn’t. Whatever Yamada wanted—really, _actually_ wanted—Yuuki didn’t want to hear it anymore. Yuuki didn’t want to be here, surrounded by people who were just now starting to notice Yusuke still going on about the history of architecture in churches while Yuuki cowered behind him, alone and forgotten—

(Protected, he told himself. God, Yusuke was protecting him. Yusuke, who couldn’t even buy a decently-sized shirt for a mixer if it meant having ten boxes of charcoal pencils sitting on his shelf and a fancy lightweight hoodie to wear at the beach.)

—and Yamada plastering on that fake, disinterested smile and nodding along. Didn’t he know how noticeable it was? Didn’t Yusuke notice?

He had to have, because it seemed that the longer Yamada pretended, the longer Yusuke went on. Yusuke had enough art trivia in his brain to go on for the next several hours if no one stopped him, and the rest of the party was staring.

Except for Togo, who yelled out that her general was about to decimate his opponent, and slapped another piece on the board. Hosoda, between Yusuke’s monologue and Togo’s declaration, looked overwhelmed.

“Yusuke,” Yuuki said softly, and bumped his arm, “you need to eat. Have something. It’s good.”

It might have been good, but most of it tasted like grease and butter. There wasn’t anything behind any of it; Leblanc’s curry, even lukewarm and a week old and with the rice grainy, tasted better.

But that was enough to break Yusuke’s train of thought. “Is it?” he asked, and the table breathed a sigh of relief.

“Tell me you ate today,” Yuuki said.

“Naturally,” Yusuke said. “I didn’t even burn the fish this time, so it was quite good.”

“Don’t tell me you always burn the fish.”

“It’s a more delicate art than I thought, cooking,” Yusuke mused. “That you can leave one thing to simmer for hours and have it be fine, well, and good at the end, but leave another for a minute and it burns to a crisp… There are simply too many variables to consider all at once.”

“Oh, it _is_ awful!” One of the girls chimed in with a nod. “I always leave my noodles to soak for too long. My mother never let anyone cook at home, so it’s the best I can do on my own.”

“Sounds like you need lessons, Segawa,” another said.

“Yeah, boys don’t like girls who can’t cook, right?” another asked.

There were a bunch of noncommittal shrugs from the boy’s side.

“It’s so difficult to do,” one of them complained, “so why even bother? Cup ramen and calorie bars all the way!”

“But those are so tasteless, and you can’t eat them everyday!”

“Yeah,” Segawa said. “I’m sick of cup ramen. I miss curry.”

“There’s a curry place out in Yongen, isn’t there?” one of the boys asked. “My cousin went there a little while ago. Said it was great.”

“Yongen?” One of the girls wrinkled her nose. Togo set down another piece as Hosoda stared down at the board with awestruck despair. “Isn’t that kinda… I dunno…”

“I rather enjoy the atmosphere there,” Yusuke said, “though I haven’t had the time to go lately.”

 _Or the fridge space_ , Yuuki thought.

“You’ve been there, Kitagawa? I thought it was a cafe, not a curry place.”

“It’s both,” Yusuke said, which earned him more stares. Segawa munched on a bit of salad as he explained, “It’s a cafe that serves both coffee and curry. The pair goes quite well together; there’s a unique spice blend that allows for it, isn’t that right, Yuuki?”

“Uh, yeah,” Yuuki said. “Or, that’s what the owner says, anyway.”

He shot Yusuke a look. Yusuke, too busy watching the table and getting in Yamada’s way, didn’t notice.

But Segawa, obviously very, very tired of instant noodles, pulled a pen and some paper out of her purse. “What’s it called? The cafe, I mean.”

“Leblanc,” Yusuke offered, and Yuuki could already see these college girls—and some of the boys, despite what one of them said about living off of calorie bars—descending on Leblanc like vultures on a carcass. Real, homemade curry and coffee that wasn’t instant? Why wouldn’t it attract hordes of similar kids who could probably barely do their own laundry?

Sure, Boss’ business would boom, but if Yuuki happened to be there when they showed up—no, he didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to think about Yamada finding out where he worked, and he really didn’t want Yamada nonchalantly grilling Boss about him, either.

Not that Boss wouldn’t kick him out if he did. Yuuki was sure there were a lot of things Sojiro Sakura could stand, but interrogation about his daughter’s friends—and one of his employees—had to be the one thing he couldn’t.

Especially since Boss was one of the few who knew about Akira. Futaba had to have warned him about people sniffing around about the app, right? Yuuki hadn’t heard of many so far, but that didn’t mean they weren’t out there; there was a guy on the forum he was considering banning for “investigating” just about every Yuuki he could find in his town—and then the next one, and the next. There had to be more guys like him out there, wanting to feel special for figuring out the truth.

“Are you alright?” Yusuke asked, and he realized half the table was looking at him. The other half was filming Hosoda’s crushing defeat and Togo’s imperial attitude as she glared down at the board; Yamada was leaning as far back in his chair as it would allow, and he tapped at his shirt—at his collarbone, where Yuuki usually left the rings. His fingers were twisted into the fabric and the tips were going numb.

“Yuuki,” Yusuke started, but Yuuki staggered out of his chair, muttering an excuse about needing to pee.

Most people, Yuuki knew, didn’t clutch at their chests like they were having a heart attack when they really, really needed to go, but no one said anything as he ran to the men’s room and shut himself up in a stall. He also knew that most people wouldn’t be having panic attacks at the thought of their classmates finding out where they work.

But Yuuki wasn’t most people. He knew that by now.

It smelled nice in there, though, which was different. Leblanc smelled so strongly of coffee and curry spices that Yuuki swore even the water tasted like it; the men’s room smelled like flowers. Something subtle that didn’t imply they cleaned the place with bleach twice a day but wasn’t so pervasive it made him want to sneeze as he breathed and held it, let it out and held it. There was a brief stillness whenever he did, as if the world outside his little stall had frozen, where the only sounds were of soft music piping in from speakers in the ceiling and the hum of the lights.

He didn’t know how long he sat there, breathing and wishing that time could stop for good. If it did, maybe the next time he opened his eyes Akira would be there, waiting with his arms wide open. It would be so, so nice to bury himself in Akira’s warmth instead of cool air and his own clammy hands, damp with tears. It would be so, so nice to have Akira’s strength nearby, holding him steady as he shook.

However long it was, it was long enough for the lights to click off. The humming stopped, and suddenly the loudest thing in the room was his breathing, still ragged. Without needing to see it, the darkness had a weight to it, and it pressed at him from every angle.

Fear trickled down his spine. Ren Amamiya had disappeared in darkness much like this one. Mankind’s ancestors had lived in terror of the beasts that hunted in the night, and Yuuki was too damn terrified of whatever clawing horrors awaited him in the dark that he continued to sit there, fully knowing that there weren’t any horrible demons that would manifest to drag him down into the pits of hell but unable to move regardless.

He was even too afraid to disturb it with a laugh. There was nothing there, and yet he was afraid of it anyway.

How pathetic.

And, how long had he been in here? Could he even go back out, now? Could he face that table with their uncomprehending faces and Yamada’s questions? None of them would understand except for Yusuke—

Right. Yusuke. Yusuke would understand; Yusuke was probably in the middle of fabricating some elaborate lie, yet another tall tale Yuuki would have to act was his life story. That was fine. It was better than the truth by a mile or more, and while Yuuki thought he wouldn’t be able to stand pity, he knew he wouldn’t be able to stand suspicion.

He’d lived for so long being the guy everyone forgot, it was hard being the guy everyone eyed twice. Yuuki didn’t understand how anyone else could stand it.

He tried to pull his phone out of his pocket, but it slipped through his fingers and hit the floor.

 _Shit_ , he thought, hissing through his teeth. It was still so dark—where did it _go_ —

And then the lights clicked on. The roar of laughter as someone stepped inside was brief but too much after all that stillness and quiet; Yuuki shut his eyes against the burn of the lights and covered his ears against the noise and still heard the soft thud of footsteps across the tile, the soft knock at his stall door.

“Mishima?” Yamada asked, and Yuuki almost whimpered. “Can you hear me? If you don’t want to say anything, you can tap the floor instead. Once for yes and twice for no, okay?”

Why did it have to be Yamada, Yuuki lamented, even as he tapped with his shoe. Why Yamada? Why not Yusuke?

(Why not Akira?)

“Are you okay?”

Was he? He no longer felt like the room was going to turn upside-down and leave him stranded, but he didn’t feel better. He wanted to leave, to go home and curl up with Akira in his ears, even if Akira wouldn’t be able to whisper soothing words to him anymore.

He tapped the floor twice.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Yamada said. “I—well, I shouldn’t have made you come. You kept turning me down, after all, but I never thought it was because you were busy with work—agh, no, that’s not right, either. I would’ve asked you to skip for a day to come. Guess I’m just a jerk, huh?”

That much Yuuki thought was obvious, and he tapped the floor.

“Ouch, that hurt,” Yamada laughed. He backed up until he hit the wall, then slid to the floor; Yuuki, even with his eyes half-open, could see him wiggle his toes in his shoes. “But, yeah. I did just say so. It’s just—it’s just hard for me to watch somebody be by themselves all the time. I was like that once, and it sucked. All I wanted was for someone to talk to me, to take notice. I thought that was what you wanted, too.”

Two or three years ago, that would have been true. The only ones who would have noticed him missing were his parents and teachers—Yuuki hadn’t belonged anywhere, not even on the volleyball team—but then he found Akira, or Akira found him, and suddenly there had been just one person who would have noticed and missed him and _cared_.

Then that one became four, and that four became six. Even the Amamiyas, off on the other side of Japan, could be counted among the people who would notice if he disappeared, now.

“But I was wrong, wasn’t I? It wasn’t that you were lonely, it was that you were busy studying to make time for your friends in the afternoon, and I was so caught up in what I thought was the reason that I wouldn’t have listened to you, even if you explained it to me.” He chuckled.

Yuuki didn’t understand what was so funny.

“It’s dumb, but,” Yamada explained, “I guess I just wanted to get to know you better, to understand why you were distancing yourself from everyone in class. I wanted to know if you were like me, too. But I just came across as pushy, didn’t I? And I only ever asked you to join the mixer, not any study groups or—or anything like that. I thought if you were around other people, you’d be a little more comfortable, or you’d find someone else you clicked with. I thought it’d be better than trying to talk to you alone, like that first time. I thought, if we were the same, I wouldn’t have liked it if someone kept cornering me and bombarding me with questions. Guess I was wrong there, too.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki croaked. “Guess you were.”

Yamada snorted. “You sound like shit.”

“I feel like shit,” Yuuki said, rubbing at his eyes. His face felt grimy. The bath he’d taken when he got up seemed like forever ago, now.

And Yamada—with a door in between them, he wasn’t that bad. He sounded like he was actually sorry for all of this, but Yuuki wasn’t sure whether that was true or not; even Kamoshida had sounded sorry when he meant to, only to turn around when no one else was watching and do as he pleased, regrets be damned.

“Found this on my way over,” Yamada said, and slid Yuuki’s phone under the door. Yuuki stared at the spiderweb of a crack jutting out from a corner of the screen. He couldn’t even find it in himself to despair over it; he picked it up and worked the buttons, fingers sliding across the surface anxious for the brush of broken glass and not finding any.

Of course it broke now, while he was having a fit in a public restroom. Of course it broke _now_ , after years of dropping it or throwing it or otherwise mistreating it—but that had to be a blessing, right? That his phone broke only after he’d helped Akira as much as he could, and not in the middle of it, and that it was just the screen and nothing internal that would mean losing access to his photos. They were all backed up on his laptop just in case, but it wouldn’t be the same.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Yeah, no problem,” Yamada said.

Someone else came in. Yuuki heard him stop at a urinal and had to imagine the face he was making as Yamada said, “Don’t mind us.”

Whoever the guy was, he did his business and left.

“The waiters might check on us next, Mishima,” Yamada said. “Do you think you can come out on your own, or do you need Kitagawa’s help?”

“I’m fine enough to move,” Yuuki said. He just didn’t want to. He didn’t want to look at any of those people from the mixer—or the staff of the diner, or whoever that guy was, just now—but he would have to, if he wanted to leave. There was a whole building between him and the entrance, and the polite thing to do would be to explain that he wasn’t feeling well and was leaving early.

He wouldn’t have to look at them to say it. Kamoshida never minded, after all.

He felt like he was moving underwater as he got up and left the stall. Yamada was still waiting on the other side, and he looked up when Yuuki came into view. “Wow, you do look awful.”

Yuuki shrugged. Ten or twenty or thirty minutes in a perfumed public restroom was better than passing out at the table again, and this time he wouldn’t have Akira to help him after. Instead of answering he shuffled over to the sink, where the water that played over his hands wasn’t refreshing. In the mirror, his face was red. He’d scrubbed salt all over his cheeks without even knowing.

He pressed his hands to his face, cool on the raw skin, and said, “I don’t get you.”

“Oh,” Yamada said. “And that bothers you.”

“Why wouldn’t it? Some classmate I barely talk to keeps asking me to join his mixers, when I can count on one hand the amount of classmates who ever talked to me before.”

Not including the bullies, naturally.

“Oh,” Yamada said again, standing now but leaning against the wall. “So it wasn’t that I asked, it was that I was persistent about it.”

He waited for anything more, but Yuuki wasn’t about to have the rest of this conversation in a place where anyone could peek in. Even being on the streets would be better than staying in here, since their conversation would just join up with the dozens of others going on around them. No one would look twice at a guy with a flushed face in this heat, either.

He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief, wiping the snot from his nose when he was done.

“I’m just gonna guess that you’re done,” Yamada said, and Yuuki nodded.

He didn’t apologize, though it did leap up his throat to tickle the tip of his tongue. He bit down to keep it in check, and they went back out to the diner together. Everyone at the table now had food in front of them—except for Togo and Yusuke, who was back in his original seat and playing a match—and all of them looked over as Yuuki and Yamada walked up to the table.

Yuuki struggled for something to say as they stared. Segawa beat him to it.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, and everyone else looked on as he opened his mouth and choked on air.

“He’s still not feeling too hot,” Yamada told her, “so I’ll walk him back to the station. He said he’ll be fine once he’s on the train—”

“Uh, no,” said another of the girls, and they all nodded as one. Yusuke’s head shot up from the board as she continued, “You’ll make sure he gets home, understand? He’s your classmate and you invited him, so you’ve got to make sure he gets back, okay?”

“Dude’s not gonna collapse in an alley somewhere, Yamamoto,” said one of the guys.

“But he might,” Yamamoto fired back, “and then we’d know that we could have stopped it. Make sure he gets home, Yamada.”

“Uh, well,” Yamada said, and Yuuki would have marveled at his loss for words if he wasn’t busy watching Yusuke glance back and forth between him and Togo. Yuuki tried to smile for him, once, and then Hosoda started egging the match back on, and Yusuke returned his focus to the game. “If you say so. Bring me mine tomorrow?”

“Yeah, sure,” Yamamoto said. “It was nice meeting you, Mishima.”

“Yeah,” Segawa said, drooling through a mouthful of hamburger steak, “feel better soon, okay?”

“Yeah,” he managed to get out before Yamada guiding him back outside. The heat was just as stifling as he remembered it, and the crowd pressed in all around them—but he was outside, finally, breathing in the air of a sweltering summer night.

Half a block from the diner he realized that Yamada had never let go of his arm. “Um,” he said, and tried to shake it off, but Yamada shook his head.

“You really do look like you’re about to collapse, you know,” Yamada said, “and in this crowd someone would step on you if you did. Yamamoto would have my head if that happened.”

“I’m not going to pass out,” Yuuki assured him, and tried again.

Yamada shook his head and gripped tighter.

“Really, I’m not,” Yuuki said.

“Like I said, Yamamoto would have my head, okay?”

Yuuki bit his lip, his free hand finding its way back to his shirt. He took one breath and said, “Let go.”

“I told you, Yama—”

“Let _go_ ,” Yuuki said.

Yamada sighed, and steered him into an alley. When he finally did let go, Yuuki’s arm still stung, the heat trapped there. Rubbing at it didn’t make it go away; rubbing at it never made it go away.

(Kamoshida, sneering, one enormous hand encircling Yuuki’s skinny forearm twice over. “All you need to do,” he spit, “is try harder, Nishina. Get up. Look, the rest of the team can do it, so why can’t you?”)

“What’s your problem?” Yamada asked, staring and staring, drilling holes straight through him. “You look like you’re going to keel over if I leave you alone, but you don’t want help?”

How, exactly, was Yuuki supposed to explain Kamoshida? Was he supposed to come out and say that he had a terrible, no good, abusive piece of shit for a coach for nearly two years, and that he’d liked putting his hands on his teams however he could? That he liked punting balls at them until their arms were covered in welts and bruises? That he’d drag them up by the hair if they collapsed to the gym floor?

“I don’t need help walking,” Yuuki settled on.

“Your legs are shaking.”

“I can still walk.”

Yamada shook his head. “You’re leaning on a wall right now, Mishima. You can’t walk like that, and it’s another three blocks to the station.”

“I can walk,” Yuuki insisted.

“Then do it,” Yamada dared, and backed up. “Five steps, and if you make it I won’t help you.”

Five steps was nothing, he thought. His apartment could be cleared in five steps—but his feet were lead and his legs were quivering like a newborn fawns’, and both he and Yamada knew he couldn’t do it.

“See?” Yamada said, after a while. “Something’s seriously wrong, okay? You need help—”

“I don’t,” Yuuki said.

“You do.”

“Not from you, I don’t,” Yuuki said, and Yamada, for the second time that night, stared, his mouth hanging open.

Pretty people, Yuuki knew, weren’t used to being rejected for anything. Yamada was one of them, with his dimples and the mole and his damned shiny teeth. Pretty people liked to think they were above dismissal, because everyone wanted to be around pretty people. Yamada could claim to be like Yuuki all he liked, but the truth was that Yamada was surrounded by friends on campus and off and had likely never encountered anyone who didn’t want to be around him.

“What in the world made you think I needed your help in the first place?” Yuuki grit out. “I looked lonely? I looked sad? Not everyone’s made to make friends wherever they go, you know, and I’m one of them—or did that make you feel better, knowing you were paying attention to a nobody like me?”

“You’re not a nobody,” Yamada said.

“Doesn’t matter. You saw some guy all by his lonesome, minding his own business, and you get in his face and—”

“I was worried about you!” Yamada protested, and stormed closer “Young people have heart conditions, too, okay?”

“So that means you can get in my face about it? Do you have any idea—”

“What?” Yamada asked when Yuuki cut himself off. “Any idea of what?”

Any idea that his damn face was right there, somehow inches from Yuuki’s. Yamada didn’t even seem to be aware of it, getting closer and closer the longer Yuuki put off answering.

(“I don’t need faggots on my team,” Kamoshida sneered. He always sneered, except when he was playing at being a good, decent teacher—which was every time he wasn’t on the court in front of his teams, and which was a fact that Yuuki couldn’t believe. Komaki and Aizawa, fellow first-years and nobodies like Yuuki, stared at their shoes with pale faces.

“What’s going on?” someone asked. Oono, probably.

“Ogawa caught ‘em kissing in the locker room before practice,” someone else replied, too tired to put any emotion into it.

“Really?” Oono said, turning back to Kamoshida and the two boys he’d continued yelling at. “Ugh, talk about gross—look, they’re holding hands! What the fuck, that’s disgusting!”

“Shut the hell up, Oono,” someone else said. A third-year, judging by his slightly lumpy face, the puffy skin belying years of Kamoshida’s spikes. “They’ll have each other, which is more than you got.”

Oono wrinkled his nose. “I’m not gonna be alone forever, y’know, and it’s miles better than being a fag.”

Whatever the third-year was going to say was drowned out by Kamoshida bellowing, “Now get _off of my court_!”

Komaki and Aizawa turned as one and bolted from the gym, shoes shrieking on the tile in the hall. They _were_ holding hands, like Oono had said, and the only thing that ran through Yuuki’s mind in that moment was how lucky they’d been to have each other for that. How nice it must have been to grip onto someone else with everything they had, and know that the other wanted them back.

That was, of course, before Akira.)

It was all very simple math in Yuuki’s head. One: being gay was some kind of mortal sin, the likes of which one could never scrub from the soul, and gay people like Komaki and Aizawa and Yuuki weren’t welcome in society. What wasn’t welcomed was cast out and scorned like trash left to rot on the side of the road.

Two: Yamada was straight, like the rest of society. Yamada had invited Yuuki to not one, not two, but _five_ mixers since their meeting in June. It felt like a bit much for a guy who was just trying to network; in fact, it felt like the kind of thing a guy desperate for a girlfriend would do, and none of the girls were biting.

If he put those two together—well, he’d done it before, hadn’t he? He’d just been missing part of the first point, before: the fact that Yuuki himself would be disgusting and unapproachable afterwards.

Ryuji had come back, but Ryuji was a good guy. Ryuji had also warned him not to do this, and Yuuki barely had time to think that Ryuji would be disappointed, too, before he was grabbing Yamada by the shirt and dragging him in.

And it wasn’t anything like he thought it would be.

The kisses in books were electric: sparks tended to fly; fireworks tended to bloom; _something_ was supposed to happen to make it something more than simply skin on skin, and Yuuki had hoped and prayed that one day he, too, would find someone who made him feel special with a single touch.

(Instead he found Akira.)

But he felt nothing from this kiss with Yamada. Just Yamada’s breath tickling his cheek and the rapid pounding of his heart as it tried to kill him faster than the beating would.

 _Punch me_ , he thought. _Hit me. Say you’ll never want anything to do with me again. Do it._ _ **Do it.**_

And Yamada said, his lips moving against Yuuki’s, “Fuck.”

Yuuki braced himself for a punch—and gasped as Yamada pushed closer, his hands reaching up to tug at Yuuki’s hair.

This wasn’t—this really, really wasn’t what he’d planned. Yamada was supposed to push him away and beat him to a bloody pulp and swear to kill him if he ever saw Yuuki again, not—not—

Not whisper Yuuki’s name against his lips like it was air for a drowning man.

Not make him feel like his head was a swarm of fireflies, causing dancing sparks behind his eyes, the rough scrape of the brick wall behind him alighting a new swarm every time Yuuki squirmed in Yamada’s grasp.

Not make him whimper and whine as Yamada’s tongue—his tongue, his damn _tongue_ —reached out to lick a stripe along Yuuki’s bottom lip, making Yuuki’s knees buckle. Yuuki dragged him down as he collapsed to the ground, but Yamada kept hold and kept kissing him, his tongue like a firebrand.

“Fuck,” he kept saying, every time he backed away enough to speak.

Yuuki’s head spun for an answer. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong. Yamada was not supposed to be kissing him back. Yamada was not supposed to be enjoying this, or shoving his tongue in Yuuki’s mouth, or pushing him back against the wall to get just the tiniest bit deeper in his fervent exploration.

And Yuuki—definitely, for sure, without a doubt—was not supposed to be enjoying it, either. He was not supposed to be shuddering as Yamada’s tongue ran across his, or across the sensitive roof of his mouth, or even over his teeth. He was not supposed to be wishing Yamada could get closer, would get closer, why was there so much cloth in the way—

A strangled noise from the mouth of the alley jerked Yamada away, but whoever made it was gone when they looked over. Yamada blinked, his eyes drooping, squinting into the crowd as he caught his breath. “Fuck,” he said, his voice dry and parched.

Then he noticed his hands still tangled in Yuuki’s hair and let go. “Fuck,” he said again, drawing it out this time.

That was Yuuki’s line, damn it. That was—that was everything he’d promised Akira and then some. That was everything Yuuki had told himself not to feel, in the dark parts of the mornings when the toddler upstairs was stomping for one reason or another and he couldn’t sleep. That was everything Yuuki hadn’t wanted to be, all rolled up in the twist of a tongue and Yamada’s sexual freak-out.

“Fuck,” Yamada chanted, as he sat back on his ass and buried his head in his hands. Helooked at Yuuki and then to the floor of the alley, over and over again.

Yuuki gripped at his shirt, wishing the rings were there. “You think you’re fucked,” he said, “I have a _boyfriend_.”

Yamada groaned.

Yuuki felt the sentiment exactly.

* * *

Ryuji’s phone buzzed at almost the exact same time that the boss killed him, and he glared at the TV and the Game Over screen he’d seen fifteen times now before switching over to his phone.

Mishima: **I fucked up**

_Great_ , Ryuji thought, setting down his controller and turning off the TV. Like all good friends he’d waited up until Yuuki gave the I’m-safe-don’t-call-the-cops message, and he wondered what happened.

Shit, what if he’d been arrested? Was he—was he sitting in the back of a police cruiser, working his phone with his hands cuffed behind him?

It was a mixer. Ryuji had heard of stranger things happening.

 **Where are you?** he sent. **Are you okay?**

He got an incoming call for his trouble. Probably not arrested, then. Didn’t cops take phones away? He should watch more shitty reality TV—at least it was kinda up to date on the laws, and Ryuji wouldn’t have to go to law school to understand half that shit.

“Seriously, dude,” he said, once he accepted. “What happened?”

“Told you, I fucked up,” Yuuki said. His voice was nasally, like it was stuffed up or broken. Ryuji hoped whatever had gone down at the mixer wasn’t a fight; Yuuki had some muscle but not enough brains to use it well, except to run away.

“How’d you fuck up, then?”

He could hear groaning from the other side, though it might have been chatter or the roar of the train as it passed by. Yuuki sniffed. “So, uh,” he said, “you know how you told me not to do—uh, _things_ —anymore?”

“Kind of,” Ryuji said, because he had said that, yeah, but the details were—oh.

Oh, right. _Things_.

“Yuuki, man, tell me you didn’t.”

“I don’t think it was as bad!” Yuuki protested. “Or, it wasn’t at first—”

“Wasn’t as bad?” Ryuji asked, before the second half hit him. “At _first_? Dude, what kind of mixer did you go to?”

His ma knocked on the door. “Everything all right, Ryuji?”

“No, it ain’t,” he said, and got up. Yuuki hadn’t said a thing, so he added, “It’s just Ma. Look, if it’s bad, I’m coming to get you.”

“Okay,” Yuuki said.

Ryuji waited for a complaint—Yuuki didn’t need him to pick him up, Yuuki didn’t need somebody watching him, Yuuki didn’t want company, whatever—but got nothing, and he froze with his door half-open, his ma on the other side watching, waiting.

“Please,” Yuuki said, and that was enough.

“Okay. What—what station are you at?”

Yuuki named off a station that was supposed to be on the good side of town and definitely nowhere near Shinjuku, which was good and bad.

Seriously. What happened?

“Ryuji,” his ma said as he stuffed his feet into a pair of shoes, “should I start some tea?”

“He might not wanna talk, ma,” Ryuji told her.

“And that’s fine, isn’t it? I didn’t push Yusuke, either, did I?”

She hadn’t. Yusuke hadn’t said much before they retreated to the couch to watch bad TV while the taller boy cried; she wouldn’t do the same now, although she would make an attempt.

“I guess it’s fine, then,” he said.

She shooed him out of the apartment and he went, taking the stairs two at a time because the elevator was so slow and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sit still inside of it; running down the crowded street was out of the question, but Ryuji went as fast as he dared to, listening as the roar of the crowd became the roar of blood in his ears.

There was a kid, crying as his ma wiped a scrape out of the crush of the crowd in an alley. Ryuji caught only a glimpse of blood, but it was enough it send him scrambling for his phone again, and when Yuuki picked up, he asked, “You don’t need an ambulance or nothing, right?”

“No,” Yuuki said. “I would’ve called one if I did. If I could.”

“Do you—do you think you’ll need one?”

“I’m not hurt,” Yuuki assured him. “I just—feel like shit.”

“Head shit,” Ryuji guessed.

The only answer he got was a laugh, dry and brittle. Ryuji could hear what Yuuki wasn’t saying in it: _and it was my fault_ ; _and I deserved it_ ; _and I’m a sack of shit who can’t keep it together_.

That wasn’t true. Whatever had happened didn’t mean that Yuuki had to go and blame himself for it—it was half the other guy’s fault, too, for doing… whatever in response.

Ryuji really, really wished he knew what was going on.

But he sucked it up and got on the train, Yuuki still quiet on the other side. Those were definitely trains he could hear, and an announcer’s default calm rattled off a line as he listened. There were lots of things he wanted to say, but the train was deathly quiet, even this early in the evening, and Ryuji didn’t want to break it.

“He’s going to hate me,” Yuuki said at some point.

Who? Ryuji wanted to ask, but if Yuuki was this beat up over it, there was only one person it could be: Akira.

“You’re going to hate me, too.”

“Never,” Ryuji said, despite the silence. He glared back at anyone who gave him dirty looks and willed the train to go faster.

It didn’t. It felt like an eternity before he was at Yuuki’s stop, looking around for him cowering in a seat somewhere; Ryuji found him over by the vending machines, holding himself like he’d fall apart if he didn’t. There was a guy two seats over with his head in his hands, shaking like the world was ending, and Yuuki was switching between watching the trains and watching him.

“Yuuki, man,” Ryuji said when he got close, which made Yuuki curl up even more. “I mean it, ya know? I’d never hate you.”

“Never’s a long time,” Yuuki said, but stood and said to the guy in the other seat: “You can go back to the mixer, Yamada. My ride’s here.”

“Fuck,” the other guy said.

“Yeah, I know,” Yuuki told him, and shuffled over to a waiting line.

Ryuji followed but couldn’t help but glance back. The other guy had lifted his head to watch them go, but when he caught Ryuji’s gaze dropped it back down. “What’s his problem?”

“He’s part of it,” Yuuki said, but didn’t say anything more.

Ryuji took stock of the situation on their way back to his place: Yuuki and—Ryuji couldn’t remember his name, just that single word he’d uttered and the look he’d cast their way when he thought they weren’t looking, and figured it didn’t matter. Yuuki didn’t seem inclined to spend much more time with the guy anyway—the other guy hadn’t looked hurt, just kind of sick. Disgusted with themselves, if Ryuji knew Yuuki well enough. He definitely didn’t know the other guy well enough; maybe he really was sick.

But whatever had happened was enough to make Yuuki think Akira would hate him for it.

His phone buzzed.

Ma: **Going to bed. You boys have a nice long chat and work this out, alright?**

Ma: **And tell your friend not to go home. He’s welcome to stay, and I insist.**

Ryuji sent her a simple **got it** and shoved his phone back in his pocket. Yuuki was scratching a long, red line into his arm, his eyes closed against the crush of people.

Ryuji let him be and tried to remember where the extra toiletries were. Under the sink? Was his ma going to leave those somewhere so he wouldn’t have to make tons of noise trying to find them? It was the sort of thing she’d do, but he couldn’t remember if they even had any.

Then again, she’d had plenty of time to take a walk to 777 down the street, or maybe she had some left over from her last business trip that weren’t going to be used. He didn’t know, and didn’t want to wake her to ask; she worked too damn hard and deserved every ounce of rest she could get.

Ryuji, who was eighteen and not a damn high school student anymore, could have been helping to support them—but every time he brought up working an extra day at his job, his ma scolded him. “Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile and bleed you dry, Ryuji,” she’d said. Everywhere was like that, apparently, except for Boss who barely pulled in enough sales to keep his shop open, which only made Ryuji wonder where he got the money to pay Yuuki from.

Maybe the guy was just lonely, sitting in a shop all day. Ryuji was, the few times he watched over the place when Boss was out.

He was glad when his stop was called, and tugged Yuuki to his feet to fight to the doors. There were still dozens of people streaming in at every stop, and as they left Ryuji elbowed a guy with his hands just a bit too close to some poor lady’s ass as the woman stared at her phone, oblivious to the world.

Then the train was gone, and Ryuji followed the flow of people out of the station and up the stairs, blinking as he remembered the time and the reason for the sky to be a solid curtain of black. Ryuji had only ever seen stars once in his life, on a single visit to his ma’s dad’s place for a funeral out in the country, and they had shone bright across that sky from one end to the other.

(One of those stars must have been Ra Ciela. Ryuji had been looking right at it, holding his ma’s hand as she cried next to him.)

Naturally, his dad hadn’t been there, and his dad wasn’t here, now, either. His dad wouldn’t be around to yell his opinion, drink until he could barely stand, and then insist that people like Yuuki weren’t welcome in _his_ house.

 _His_ house, as if the asshole had ever paid a single yen for it.

“That hurts,” Yuuki said, and Ryuji shook himself out of thoughts of his worthless dad and star-filled nights and back to the present. His grip on Yuuki’s arm went a little looser.

“Sorry,” he said. “We’re almost there.”

“Isn’t your mom home?” Yuuki asked while they waited for the elevator, because now that Ryuji had him in hand all that panicky energy was gone, and Ryuji wasn’t sure Yuuki could take the stairs anyway. His legs weren’t shaking anymore, but that didn’t mean he could climb ten flights of stairs, not like this. “Won’t we be bothering her?”

“As long as we’re quiet, we’ll be fine. Unless—do you think we’re gonna fight? Cause if we are, Ma won’t be happy ‘bout that.”

Yuuki shrugged. “Maybe. I’ve been told I’m a good punching bag.”

“Yuuki, dude,” Ryuji said, but the elevator dinged and he lost whatever scrap of words he had been trying to find as they got on.

“I don’t want to have a fight,” Yuuki said, and lurched as the elevator started its way up. “I know it was wrong. I know I shouldn’t have done it, but I did it anyway. You don’t need to tell me that for me to know it wasn’t… right.”

“Okay,” Ryuji said. It wasn’t like he planned his blowups, but he’d try extra-fucking-hard not to have one now. Whatever it was, Yuuki didn’t need somebody jumping down his throat on the morality of it. “I’ll just, you know, listen, then. You know I’m no good with advice and all that.”

Mostly because any advice Ryuji could give him would be too aggressive or too confrontational. Yuuki didn’t like being in the spotlight, and screaming at some guy for whatever he’d done was a pretty easy way to wind up with every eye in the area on them.

Also: Kamoshida. Ryuji clearly had not handled that well—and Yuuki might wind up with worse than a broken leg and a ruined reputation.

“Oh, yeah, and Ma says you’re staying the night,” Ryuji told him. “No going home like this, got it?”

Yuuki only nodded. Ryuji guessed that it was a good thing, him recognizing when he wasn’t in the right headspace to make it home okay; a year ago Yuuki would have argued and argued until storming off, leaving Ryuji to wonder and worry until he came back again, acting like it had never happened.

Maybe they were better off that way then, but this wasn’t back then. This was now, and Yuuki wanted to talk out his feelings, and Ryuji had to at least listen.

The tea was warm and the apartment dark when they arrived, the only light coming from over the sink and the TV in Ryuji’s room. Yuuki took the bowl of snacks Ryuji handed him: rice crackers and those stale chocolate cookies Ryuji knew his ma liked and dried fruit and jerky still in the bags. He stared at it as Ryuji took up the tea tray and muttered, “I didn’t pay my share.”

“Your share?”

“At the mixer,” Yuuki explained as they went into Ryuji’s room. The table was still covered with his crap—but the desk was clear, if a little dusty.

He should really study more, use it for something other than holding up the laptop Ryuji wasn’t even sure actually worked, but he liked the little table, and being able to spread his books and papers out. He didn’t feel so crammed in, then.

“Although, I did only have a bit of the appetizers,” he went on as Ryuji cleared off the table. He shoved the clothes under the bed, and the manga went on the shelf with the rest. “Do you think I can still pay them back, after leaving so suddenly?”

“I dunno,” Ryuji said. “Maybe?”

Yuuki sighed, then. He set the bowl down, sat, and then let his head rest on the table. “The only ones I knew there were Yamada and Yusuke—oh, Yusuke was there. Did he tell you he had plans?”

“Nah, you know how he is.” He poured out tea. It wasn’t going to taste that great no matter what he put in it, like it always did, so he let Yuuki have first pick of the sugar and honey.

He didn’t take either, sipping at what Ryuji gave him despite it being nothing more than weakly flavored water that smelled good. Ryuji dumped a few sugar cubes in his own drink and opened a cracker. “So, uh, what exactly happened?”

“I kissed Yamada,” Yuuki said, and sniffed.

Ryuji fought down the urge to give him a look—but he already knew it was wrong, didn’t he? He’d said so. “And?”

“I told you it wasn’t that bad at first, right? Well, it wasn’t, but then he, uh.”

He mumbled out something too low for Ryuji to hear. Ryuji could guess what it was: Yamada called him a fag, or something like that, and now Yuuki’s tentative college friendships were ruined—but the thing that nagged at him about that was the way Yamada had stared after them at the station, as if he was jealous, or—

“Shit,” Ryuji said.

“I know,” Yuuki said, covering his face with his hands. “I didn’t—I mean, no one ever did that before. Akira wants to, but I thought he was the only one—”

“He’s not,” Ryuji said. Yusuke—and Ryuji knew now what those searching glances had been, back when they’d met Futaba: he’d been looking for Yuuki, was disappointed he wasn’t there. Yamada could have passed for a puppy left out in the rain for his master to come home while knowing he’d get scolded for dripping all over the floor, and all Yuuki had been doing was walking away. It was kinda sad to watch somebody so obviously hope that his crush was going to turn around and run back to him, and Yamada had to be the more proactive type. More proactive than Yusuke, anyway.

Akira, Yusuke, that Yamada guy… That made three people who wanted to date Yuuki. _Three_.

“Don’t tell me there are more,” Yuuki begged him. “Please, I don’t think I can take it.”

“What?” Ryuji asked. “There’s nothing wrong with having guys who wanna date you, right? It just means Akira’s gonna have to hurry up and come home.”

“And find out someone else took what he wanted the most? I don’t think he’ll be too happy about that.”

“So, what? You’re gonna say yes?”

“To what?” Yuuki asked.

“To Yamada,” Ryuji said. “He asked you out, didn’t he?”

Yuuki made a noise that sounded like a mixture between a croak and a heave. He gulped his tea down, then fiddled with the cup. “He kissed me back, that’s all,” he said, after a while. “You—you think he wants to go out with me?”

“Yeah, I do,” Ryuji said. That kicked-puppy look at the station. Most guys Ryuji knew wouldn’t take kindly to another guy kissing them, either.

“I can’t do that,” Yuuki said, hand twisting in his shirt. “I can’t—I’ve got Akira. I thought if I kissed him, he’d be too disgusted to talk to me anymore, but he kissed me back and it—it was everything I wanted it to be, just not with the person I wanted.”

Ryuji bit back all the retorts he could throw at that— _I told you not to_ , some people want that kind of thing from everybody, _I_ told _you not to_ —and ate the last of his cracker. Yuuki wasn’t eating anything, so he plopped one down in front of him.

Yuuki picked at the wrapping, his hands shaking too much to get a proper grip. “He scares me. I can’t go out with him. I won’t do it, not even if he asks, if he wants to at all.”

Ryuji was pretty damn sure he did. That look said everything, and Yuuki hadn’t seen it, would be too freaked to read it properly even if he had. “He scares you?”

“He reminds me of Kamoshida.” He finally tore the wrapping off, broke his cracker into chunks. Ryuji poured him more tea. “Did you ever—you didn’t have him long as a coach, but he had this way of getting in your face, you know, and digging and prodding for stuff that would make us explode at him, and then he’d give the whole team suicide runs to do as punishment. He’s like that. He asked me about the rings, and his face was so close I could smell his breath, Ryuji. Is that normal? Do people really _do_ that?”

“You think he’s digging for info about Akira.”

“I think he’s doing something, and it’s not going out with me.”

“Then don’t,” Ryuji said. “If he asks you, don’t. We’ll work on your arms more, and running.”

Yuuki nodded, and bit into a piece of cracker.

He didn’t seem to want to talk anymore, but Ryuji had to ask. “Is that how you fucked up? Kissing him, even though he scares you?”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said. “I kissed him and it felt good, and I felt like shit after. I’ve got Akira. I shouldn’t be going around kissing guys who scare me just because it might scare them off. I mean, if you found out Ann was doing the same behind your back, you’d be mad, right?”

“Yeah,” Ryuji said. “Who wouldn’t be—oh. Okay, I think I get it.”

“Whether or not Yamada likes me enough to date me, I can’t,” Yuuki said. “I don’t want to. I want him to leave me alone, and stop making me feel things I haven’t felt since Akira was around.”

“Dude, you can say he gives you a boner.”

Yuuki glared at him for that. Ryuji took a cookie from the bowl.

“Fine,” Yuuki said, tearing into his cracker. “He does, and I hate it. I hate him and his stupid pretty face and—and the way he makes me feel like I might be special. I’m not, I’m just some guy who’s so lonely everything’s either a threat or an advance, and I _hate_ it, Ryuji.”

“You can talk to people just fine,” Ryuji said. “You do it all the time at the cafe, right? You just need practice talking to pretty people with stupid faces. And not everybody’s good at reading people, okay? Look at me, I’m dense as a brick.”

“You’re getting better,” Yuuki said.

“No, you’re getting better at telling me when something’s bothering you so I don’t gotta work it out myself. You wouldn’t be talking to anybody else about this, right?”

“You’re my friend.”

“I’m your _best_ friend,” Ryuji corrected. “And you’re mine.”

Then he grinned. “Maybe next time we’re at the gym—”

“No,” Yuuki said.

“Dude, I didn’t even finish!”

“Because you’re going to tell me to find a new spotter,” Yuuki said, his fingers twisting and twisting, “and I know that Fukuoka will do it. I can’t take that, Ryuji.”

“Fine,” Ryuji said, though he was out of ideas, now. Fukuoka was friendly and liked to encourage anyone who walked by and—okay, yeah, not that great of an idea. He’d probably kiss back, too, and then Yuuki would be even worse off than he was now.

“I just—maybe when Akira’s back,” Yuuki added. “Maybe when he’s back and I’m, I don’t know, more secure? That’s what this feels like, like I’m drifting around looking for love in all the wrong places. Akira, he—he made me happy, you know that, and it’s like—anyone who smiles at me the right way does, too, and then I go home and think that it shouldn’t have, that I shouldn’t be so needy.”

Ryuji couldn’t relate to that. He’d hoped for love to come his way like every other highschool boy, but he hadn’t been seeing it in every little motion.

Then again, his ma was good to him. The little touches and the smiles over dinner and the hugs she liked to give if they were both up for breakfast at the same time all added up, and Ryuji wasn’t desperate for what he could get if he just went home. Takeishi and the other guys on the track team had called him a momma’s boy for it, but they hadn’t realized that Ryuji and his ma were almost the only family they had.

But, fuck. How could a guy be needy for wanting some attention? How could anybody be needy for wanting someone to love them when no one else would? It wasn’t right; it wasn’t fair.

“And I’ll talk it over with Akira, too,” Yuuki said, and pulled a face. “Even if it means he winds up smothering me because he thinks I’ve been deprived. We’ll have to talk about it, all of it, including whatever he’s going through.”

“Even if he hates you for it?”

“You said he wouldn’t,” Yuuki reminded him. Then he sighed, reaching for another cracker and the bag of jerky. “I hope he won’t be. I don’t want him to be mad at me; I want to talk it over with him, at least. Tell him I’m sorry for doing it. I’m not going to be his first kiss, so I guess this is kind of fair, in a way—but that’s justifying it, and I shouldn’t be doing that.”

“You really thought this over, huh.”

“You would, too, if there was a toddler storming around your ceiling.”

“It’s that bad?”

“I don’t think she ever sleeps,” Yuuki told him, grimacing. “I thought that’s what kids did, you know, sleep a lot. But she doesn’t. She just runs around, and I guess she dances sometimes.”

“Maybe she sleeps when you’re not around.”

“Maybe,” he said.

Ryuji wasn’t sure what else to say as Yuuki dug into the snacks on the table with a gusto that should have been worrying. Yuuki had kissed a guy of his own free will, and that sealed any doubt Ryuji might have had that maybe, just maybe, Yuuki didn’t play for the other team—and that was okay, Ryuji thought. They didn’t have to be perfect twins to be friends, or best friends, or anything else.

He glanced at his TV, where his GameStation had long since gone to sleep, and grabbed his controller.

Disastrous consequences could wait for another day. Right now Yuuki just needed support, somebody by his side to prop him back up when he was feeling down, and he’d come to Ryuji instead of wallowing in self-pity and disgust and trying to act like he hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Well, since you’re here,” Ryuji said, as Yuuki poured himself more tea, “help me with this boss, man. He’s kicking my ass.”

“Oh,” Yuuki said, wiping salt off his fingers, “I can’t have that, can I? Show me how it works and then I’ll try.”

It was better than nothing, Ryuji figured. It was better than a lot of other things, too.

They could figure the rest out as they went, after all.


	14. Summer Vacation, Sunday

Yusuke did not remember going back to the mixer. He knew he must have, because by the time he went home his stomach was full and his phone had half a dozen new contacts in it; he knew he must have, because Togo had sent him a barrage of messages on the train that he just barely remembered answering.

He knew he must have, because the station was where Yuuki and Yamada had been headed, and that was the last place he wanted to be after—

The door slammed shut behind him. He felt for the coat rack, put his bag on it, then slumped to the floor, too drained to try and untie his shoelaces.

“Yusuke?”

“Yes?” he croaked, and his voice was hoarse and cracked. He couldn’t find the willpower to move even a single finger, now that he was home and no longer had to move.

Yuuki and Yamada. He’d thought—he’d thought—

“What in the world happened?” Nakanohara asked, standing over him. “It’s late, Yusuke. Where were you?”

“I told you I was going out,” Yusuke told him, “though you didn’t seem to hear me. I was at a mixer, meeting new people, as I should be doing.”

“What did you drink, Yusuke?”

“Water.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

Did he? Nakanohara didn’t drink. Madarame certainly never imbibed while at the atelier. The only stories Yusuke had to go off of were the ones in books and movies, where the drunk made a fool of himself, or drank to forget, or drank to dull some deep, aching pain. “Do I?”

“Yusuke,” Nakanohara said. It might have been a warning, but Yusuke was too disoriented, too oddly blank and unfeeling and hollow, to care. His lungs were cold. It felt as if all of the color had seeped out of the world—out of his body, even—and there was nothing left except gray and empty air.

“Yes?”

Nakanohara stared long enough that Yusuke felt fear creep into his system. Nakanohara was going to kick him out, and for not staying in and painting. Nakanohara no longer wanted him here, taking up space in his apartment, when Yusuke could be a perfectly good door stopper somewhere else.

Nakanohara leaned down and said, “I’m sorry, Yusuke.”

“What for?”

“For the way I’ve been acting. Diving into my sketches and the painting like this, like we were back at the atelier and I had no other obligations. I swore to take care of you, and promised we would split the work, but I haven’t upheld that bargain lately, have I?”

“No, you have not.”

“Well, I intend to change that, starting today. Now, what happened?”

“It was only a mixer,” Yusuke said.

“And did something happen at this mixer?”

Yusuke opened his mouth to speak—and then closed it. Technically it hadn’t been at the mixer itself, but it had been _during_ the mixer, which surely had to count—and he wasn’t quite sure how to say it, either. That Yuuki had been there. That Yuuki had left early with a young man that sent chills up Yusuke’s spine. That he had seen them, pressed together in an alley, the most delightful of noises coming out of Yuuki’s mouth—

“I thought so,” Nakanohara said, wiping at Yusuke’s cheek. His finger came away wet, and there were noises coming out of Yusuke’s throat that had nothing to do with the empty, aching feeling in his chest. “Oh, Yusuke, Yusuke. Tell me what happened, now.”

He tried, but the noises overpowered his senses. He couldn’t speak past them, couldn’t make sense of any thought he tried to grasp that might help, couldn’t even move his head as Nakanohara took out a handkerchief and began to wipe the tears away. It was warm from his pocket and seemed to leech the cold away, and Yusuke pressed into it, chasing the warmth and the fire.

Nakanohara said his name over and over. Nakanohara said his name more times in ten minutes than Madarame had in Yusuke’s entire life. Nakanohara, his motions stiff, took Yusuke in his arms and held him there. He didn’t say everything would be alright. He didn’t ask for any kind of explanation.

Yusuke wasn’t quite sure what he could have said. Yuuki and Yamada—and Yusuke had thought he was _helping_ , getting in between them like that, offering up his seat to be a buffer, a bulwark. Yuuki hadn’t wanted it, hadn’t needed it.

“I’ll find someone who’ll come back to me,” he had said, months and months—or was it years?—ago.

And he had, but—

But—

If Yusuke had known, if he hadn’t distanced himself even the smallest amount, would that have been him, pressing Yuuki into a wall and drinking down his sighs? If he had known Yuuki to be so impatient, so greedy for physicality, Yusuke would have given him everything—and all the while Yuuki was still thinking of Akira and how best to fulfill his obligations and bring the lost boys home.

What Yusuke would have given for the chance—

And instead it was Yamada. Friendly Yamada, the girls said, Yamada who was quick to smile or grin and make them feel wanted—even Yuuki, who Yusuke knew wasn’t a fan of large gatherings of strangers.

There was nothing Yusuke could do. Yuuki had chosen, and he hadn’t chosen the stoic, eccentric artist Yusuke knew everyone still referred to him as. Yuuki had chosen someone who would look upon him as if he were looking into the sun, dazed and awed and smiling for the joy of it.

Try as he might, Yusuke would never be the one Yuuki wanted.

That much was clear.

“How did you ever stand it,” he asked after a time, “knowing that Kayo would never choose you again?”

“I didn’t,” Nakanohara said. “Every time I saw her with another, it drove a knife into my gut, knowing I would never have that again— _could_ never have that again. It was as if someone was taking art from me again, Yusuke, and even if I have to watch over her from afar to ensure she doesn’t disappear entirely, I’ll do it.”

“Our bet still stands,” Yusuke reminded him.

Nakanohara sighed. “Yes, I know.”

Yusuke didn’t have to ask to know that this pain would never leave him. Love made men foolish because it drove them mad to lose it, as if a piece of their own soul had been torn off, leaving them incomplete—or perhaps it was the other way around, that men were incomplete beings without the ones they loved close at hand, and when the realization that they would never be complete hit them, the loss was enough to make them lose their minds.

Yusuke wasn’t sure which was correct. The hollow feeling, the ice in his heart—surely something had been lost, as he had never felt like this before; or it was that he was only now aware of the emptiness that had been living inside him for so long.

Madarame, after all, had not been a good father. Yusuke was a broken, unwanted boy from the start, like all of Madarame’s other students, and no amount of love he felt would ever change that.

* * *

“I don’t think I’m even surprised,” Yuuki muttered, when he found Ryuji in the kitchen the next morning. They’d stayed up late beating the boss in Ryuji’s game, hushing each other when they got too loud, eating snacks as they waited for their turn. Yuuki had filled up on tea and stale cookies and jerky that might have made a better choice as leather, and spilled his guts out about Yamada.

Date him. Yuuki would rather experience Kamoshida all over again—not that he was going to admit it, but at least the coach had been transparent. At least Yuuki had known what he wanted instead of playing the nerve-wracking game of will-he-won’t-he every time he came around.

His hand searched for the rings, even as he remembered stowing them away in an empty container in his closet. He’d thought Yamada would make a big show of looking them over in front of his classmates—people Yuuki might have to deal with for another four years—and hadn’t wanted him to, and had still bungled it all.

“I _can_ cook,” Ryuji said from the stove. He flipped eggs; toast popped at his elbow. He was wearing an apron, the kind that buttoned in the back instead of needing to be tied.

“It doesn’t suit you.”

“I can eat your share,” Ryuji said.

Yuuki’s stomach complained at that; he felt the wave of dizziness hit him moments after, and he grabbed at a chair for support. “Please, don’t.”

“Go wash your hands, then,” Ryuji said. “It’ll be done by the time you get back.”

“Yeah, okay,” Yuuki said, and shuffled his way over to the bathroom. There was an extra toothbrush still in the package resting on the sink, and he stared at it as he washed his hands and face and tried to ignore how grubby he felt for sleeping in his clothes on Ryuji’s floor. There was a crick in his neck, too.

Try as he might, there was nothing noticeably different about his face. He’d worried that maybe something about what he’d done would stick to him—like a bruise, maybe—but there was nothing except the ghost of the pressure of Yamada’s hands as they scrabbled for purchase in his hair and the static that had come from his lips.

Would kissing Akira feel like that, too?

Or would Yuuki try to push him away, too scared to bare himself to the only one who loved him? Maybe that was another reason why Yuuki was scared of Yamada: in that moment anything Yamada wanted, Yuuki would have given to him. Anything.

He was so fickle. So pathetic. One brief moment of passion, and he was ready to throw away the one who cared about him the most? Would Akira still love him, if Yuuki was sullied, dirtied, used?

He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know; he only wanted to love Akira. He dried his face and went back to the kitchen, where Ryuji was pouring drinks.

“Was thinking,” Ryuji said as Yuuki sat down, “you wanna do something today? We can head back to your place for a change of clothes then hang out somewhere. Boss don’t need your help today, right?”

“He doesn’t,” Yuuki confirmed, staring down at his food. He should cook more often. Akira would get angry with him if he found out Yuuki was back to eating microwaved junk most of the time—but if he didn’t, all the curry Boss kept giving him would go to waste, and Yuuki didn’t want that, either. Maybe one of the girls from the mixer would like a couple containers of the stuff, and it would get him talking with other people so busybodies like Yamada wouldn’t feel the urge to meddle.

“Thanks for making this,” he added.

“No prob. Let’s dig in; I dunno about you, but I’m starving!”

It wasn’t the best food in the world, but it was hot and not burnt and Yuuki’s stomach might have accepted anything he fed it at that point, even cold curry out of the fridge.

Segawa, he remembered, would like curry. Maybe he’d find her—but the only person who might know her number was Yamada, and after last night, Yuuki wasn’t keen on talking to him for a while. He’d have to eventually; they’d have to do something, talk it out, make absolutely certain that Yamada knew Yuuki wasn’t looking for anyone else to date, but not right now.

And after that talk last night, Yuuki wasn’t really feeling up to going to the gym, either. He might stare at Fukuoka if the guy was there, and Yuuki wasn’t about to cause himself even more trouble.

Maybe they could just walk around the park, or stay here and laze around. Not thinking about anything sounded nice. Not _having_ to think about anything sounded nice.

Oh, but— “What about Takamaki?”

“Ann’s got a couple of shoots today,” Ryuji said. “We can drop by for a while if you want. Say hi, see how Suzui’s doing.”

Suzui, wearing her scars proudly on the beach. She had overcome Kamoshida. Yuuki, too, had overcome Kamoshida, but Suzui was kind and forgiving and Yuuki wasn’t; no matter what she told him, he would never forgive himself for relaying that message. Suzui was probably spending the day wandering Tokyo at her own pace, finding old friends and catching up while Takamaki was at work.

But just because he felt guilty didn’t mean he had to avoid them. They could be friends, despite what he’d done—or at least, Suzui seemed to want to be, which was more than Yuuki would if he were ever in her situation.

“Sure,” he said. If all they did was drop by, he could stand it.

Except as soon as breakfast was over and the dishes were dry and put away, Yuuki went back to his phone to find a message from Yamada. It was short and simple and made his stomach turn over.

Ryuji, who had been in the bathroom changing, came back to gather up his wallet and phone to find him staring at it, wishing it said anything else.

“What’s up?” Ryuji asked.

“Yamada,” Yuuki said. “He wants to talk to me.”

 **Your boyfriend can come too** , said a later message, but Yuuki wasn’t about to relay that part. Was Yamada assuming Ryuji was Yuuki’s boyfriend, or was he only saying that to be polite or to find out what kind of guy wanted to date Yuuki?

This was too much.

“What, now?”

“Yeah, now,” Yuuki said. “Today, if possible. I guess he’s the type to want to clear the air as soon as he can.”

Ryuji snorted. “Probably just wants to get groveling and apologizing outta the way so he won’t have to feel awkward later. You wanna go?”

He didn’t exactly have the choice not to go. If Yuuki put this off, Yamada could just corner him on campus or out on the street and insist on doing it then, instead, and Yuuki didn’t want to live with that anticipation crawling up his spine whenever he saw Yamada. “It’d be better to,” he sighed, typing out a hasty, **Where?** “Or he’ll just keep bugging me about it, and that’s tiring. But if you don’t want to hang out after, I understand.”

“I’m not gonna make ya talk to him and then bail, dude,” Ryuji said. He slung an arm around Yuuki’s shoulders. “But you should shower and change those clothes first. Brush your teeth, shit like that.”

“Make myself presentable for when I dump him because I’m already dating someone,” Yuuki guessed.

“Yeah, exactly!” Ryuji shook him. “See, you get it. You should—”

“I know, I know. I should believe in myself more.” Ryuji still faintly smelled of frying eggs and bacon. Yuuki clung to his arm, thought it over for half a second, then reached over with his other one, twisting so he had Ryuji in a hug. Hugging was nice. Hugging was far less likely to make him spiral down the dark path of absolute shit he’d felt like last night.

Ryuji was startled by the motion only for as long as it took him to catch his balance, and then he was hugging back, hard enough that it felt like Yuuki’s ribs were creaking. He soaked it in: the discomfort, the warmth, Ryuji’s grounding presence as he breathed in Yuuki’s ear.

So damn different from Yamada.

“Thanks for last night. I really thought you were going to rail on me for it. I thought you weren’t going to want anything to do with me anymore, after I did something so stupid again.”

“If I left you then, where would you be now?” Ryuji asked. “Where would you be ten months from now? I worry ‘bout you, you know. Everybody does.”

 _Not everybody_ , Yuuki thought. Just his friends and Hirotaka, and Akira and maybe the Amamiyas—but those were the only ones that mattered.

Maybe those were the only ones Ryuji meant—no, they had to be. _Everybody_ was everybody who mattered to Ryuji, too.

It was too much. Too many people, when before he’d had no one save for his own parents, and even then they hadn’t cared until it was too late.

But Yuuki didn’t say any of that: not the fact that having so many people who cared about him now was overwhelming; not the idea that he was too insignificant in the vastness of Tokyo to be worth anyone’s time; not even that just having one person that he could turn to felt like more than he deserved. Ryuji wouldn’t agree with any of it, and Yuuki didn’t want to fight after avoiding it last night.

So he just agreed, and Ryuji’s answering grunt of a laugh rumbled through his chest.

“But you know, if you do anything really stupid, I’m gonna drag you back here and get on your case the whole time, got it?”

It was Yuuki’s turn to laugh. He wasn’t sure he would do anything stupid ever again—or at least, it wouldn’t be anything as stupid as this. “Got it.”

“Good,” Ryuji said, and thumped his back for good measure. Yuuki should have been afraid of the strength in those hits, in the sheer raw power coiled throughout Ryuji’s body, but he wasn’t.

The certainty that Ryuji would never, ever be like Kamoshida hit him, then. Ryuji could hurt others but he wouldn’t; it just wasn’t in his nature to, even if he was a hothead with a short fuse. Ryuji knew better, knew just as well as Yuuki what kind of lives power without control could ruin. He knew the pain of being squashed underfoot as someone else’s stepping stone to the top and wouldn’t dare to do the same.

Yuuki squeezed back, as hard as he could, and relished every second of it.

* * *

“But—does she have to?”

Futaba wanted to pat herself on the back for managing to avoid sounding like she was whining. Mom and Kana had spent all day—all day!—yesterday at the lawyer’s offices, or the police station, or the courts, or wherever it was they had to go to spend an entire day out. They’d left before she’d woken up and had gotten back after she’d gone back to sleep, and this was the first thing Futaba woke up to?

“They’ve got a point,” Sojiro said. “She can’t stay here forever. For one thing, I don’t have enough beds.”

“They’ll make sure Kana’s safe, Futaba,” Wakaba assured her.

Safe. Of course. As if foster homes or her aunt or uncle’s place would be safer than staying here, where Futaba could warn her if her parents came within a hundred miles of the place.

Safe was subjective. Look at Ren Amamiya: he was safe, sure, if being an amnesiac locked in his own mind and trapped in another dimension was safe.

“And they promised Mom and Dad wouldn’t be able to contact me or my guardians,” Kana said. “They won’t know what’s going on until they get the papers. They’ll be frantic by then, but I have everything important to me with me, and I dumped the laptop they gave me in a lake at one of my stops in case they tried to rifle through it.”

Futaba would have been proud of her if it hadn’t meant she had to stop being upset she was leaving. And just as quick as she’d arrived, too! They were barely making strides to being actual friends, and summer vacation wasn’t even over yet!

“Maybe they’ll let me go to your school festival,” Kana mused. “We’re friends, after all, and Tokyo is pretty far from where Mom and Dad are. There’s no way they’ll think of me coming here.”

“That might be a bit of a stretch, Kana,” Wakaba warned.

“Yeah,” Sojiro sighed. “They’ll want you safe and sound where they can see you at all times. I’ll be surprised if they let you go to school while all of this is being resolved, but there are ways of staying up to date with your schoolwork even if you miss a lot of it.”

Kana only nodded to that.

Futaba stared down at her breakfast, confused by the idea that come tomorrow, Kana would be gone—and she wasn’t happy or sad about it. They hadn’t formed anything, no bond or everlasting friendship or weird mind vows, over the last few days. They’d fought, and then Futaba had left her behind to go to the beach, and she knew that she’d still been angry at Kana for the fight, then, but that hadn’t excused her behavior.

Had she only asked to help, thinking it would earn her another friend? Had she thought Kana would be so grateful she would then look past all of Futaba’s oddities and decide she was worth getting to know? Had she thought that she’d finally be thanked for being the nosy witch her old classmates always said she was?

Life sucked, but Futaba’s sucked the most; there wasn’t a single girl in her circle—well, three points didn’t make a circle, but whatever—of friends. She had no one to geek out with when the latest episode of Featherman or the newest anime came out. She had no one ask for outfit advice when she went shopping. She had no one to go to Akihabara and haggle over old games with.

Well, no _girls_ anyway. Was it so wrong to want a single girl in their little group? Was it so wrong that, after years of hearing how weird she was, she didn’t want to be anymore?

Kana was normal, unlike Futaba. Kana was Futaba’s chance of learning how to be normal—and now she was leaving.

“We can still chat on Textter,” Kana said.

Futaba nodded. She couldn’t bring herself to look up from her plate, and she picked at what was left of her food: a few scraggly leaves of lettuce, the end of an omelet, a couple clumps of rice. Chatting on Textter would be safer, sure, but it wouldn’t be the same. Futaba wouldn’t be able to watch Kana’s expressions change, or know that she’d said something odd when Kana rolled her eyes.

And it was hard to be Futaba sometimes, when she was behind her keyboard. She’d been Medjed and Alibaba for so long she knew their speech patterns by heart; she dreamed, sometimes, that she had become them, and ruled over the ‘net with an impervious aura.

She was a god, there. Out here she was just Futaba.

But then Wakaba said: “I’m not sure they’ll let you do that. Locations can be traced from online messages, can’t they? If your parents find out where you are, you’ll have to be moved again.”

“She’ll be fine,” Futaba said, and felt their gazes burn holes through her head. “I can set up a scrambler for her account. It’ll give a different IP every day if they check it; I can send them halfway to Africa, if you want.”

“Africa might be a bit much,” Sojiro said, wry grin in his voice, “but if it means they miss their court date and default…”

“Sojiro,” Wakaba said, with a sharp edge just a hair off from being cutting.

“I don’t think they’re that smart,” Kana said. Futaba dared to look up, and her eyes were glittering with laughter; the idea of her parents being desperate enough to chase her halfway around the world must have been funny, even if Futaba didn’t think so. Futaba thought it was sad, how some people were so desperate for easy lives they were willing to ruin others’ to get there. Futaba wouldn’t put it past Kana’s parents to hire a detective or a hacker to find out where their daughter was, court papers or whatever it was going to be or no, because if Kana disappeared like so many other children, it would be years before she would be found again, if she was at all.

Because in the end they were smart enough to come up with this stupid scheme in the first place. They were smart enough to lie and lie well and they were going to keep at it until they were happy.

They would never be happy.

She still lied and said, “Yeah, probably not,” and thought of how easy it would be to make Kana’s parents think she was in Antarctica, or the North Pole, or deep in the jungles of South America. She was going to have to watch them closely: monitor their search histories and bank accounts, maybe screen their phone calls.

Kana deserved better. Kana, normal Kana, deserved to be loved.

And if that meant Futaba had to be her digital guardian angel, so be it.

And it must have shown on her face, because now Sojiro was eyeing her. “Futaba, we talked about this,” he reminded her.

She remembered. How could she forget blurting out something she’d heard in the cafe when she was locked up in her room all the time? How could she forget the way he sat her down and asked her—patient and kind, if a little stern—how she could possibly have known about it? She remembered talking through it, too, hope and despair warring in her heart. No one ever praised Medjed, but surely Sojiro would praise her for helping people even if it meant peeking in on their lives.

He had, but he also hadn’t. He had, but he had told her to stop. It wasn’t right, he had said, to be a fly on the wall, to be privy to the things others wanted to keep private. It wasn’t right to then flash their secrets to the world—even if it meant lives were saved, even if it kept kids from being scarred.

Futaba still thought it was a stupid idea, letting people like Kana’s parents keep their secrets while their daughter suffered. Monkey-boy would tell her it was shit. Inari and Nishima would agree with her too, she was sure of it.

“I know,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she should say the rest, but—but—

Futaba was tired of lying. Futaba was also tired of agreeing with everything everyone else said. She didn’t want to rock the boat, and it made her nervous to, but she had to say it. “I still think you’re wrong. Just because I get my information through a different channel than everyone else doesn’t mean it’s wrong, and just because you’re used to saying that the law should handle it doesn’t mean that they can. Could they have done anything without what I gave Kana?”

Sojiro sighed. “Futaba, that’s not what I meant.”

“It _is_ what you meant,” she said. “People keep secrets because they know they’ll get in trouble for them, but I’ve never exposed anybody who doesn’t deserve it! If they’re hurting people, they need to be stopped, and it’s not like I’ve ever thrown anyone in jail on my own, you know!”

“I think what Sojiro meant to say was that Kana’s parents are already going to be watched by capable people,” Wakaba said, “and if they find you snooping around, Futaba, you might get in trouble, too. You’ve done what you can, so let the police do their job, now.”

“It’s easy to sit back and think you’re invulnerable just because you’re behind a screen or proxies or whatever they’re called,” Sojiro said, stacking his plates and getting up. “You’re good at what you do, Futaba, but that doesn’t mean the police don’t have people who are just as good as you are, and you don’t want to be dragged into a courtroom of people and torn into by those hyenas who call themselves lawyers. They won’t care that you were helping people; they’ll only care that you were breaking the law.”

“We only worry for you, Futaba,” Wakaba said. “There are points where getting involved any further won’t be any good for you. Trust the police with the rest, alright?”

Futaba had trusted the police before. Futaba had given them every scrap of evidence she could find before disappearing like a ghost, only checking in on the investigations through the media, if it was ever broadcast.

No, trusting the police wasn’t the problem. “I just don’t want Kana to get hurt or disappear,” she admitted. “If I can’t watch her, how will I know she’s okay? If I can’t watch them, how will I know she’s not being hunted down?”

Kana stared at her, mouth open wide, too surprised to say anything. Futaba, who had never expressed any interest in her classmates, suddenly caring about her safety?

 _Newsflash_ , Futaba thought, _I care about a lot of things._

“You won’t,” Wakaba said, and reached out a hand to stroke her hair. “That’s the hard part, but once it’s over, Kana will be okay. She won’t have to worry anymore.”

That didn’t mean Kana wouldn’t dream of it, years and years later. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t haunt her even when she was happy and living the life she always wanted.

Kana stacked her dishes, too, setting them down by the sink. “I should go pack,” she said, once Sojiro shook off her offer to help wash.

“Well,” Wakaba said, taking her own stack over, “just so we’re clear, I haven’t forgotten what we’re going to talk about, but that can wait for later. Go spend a little more time with Kana, alright, Futaba?”

It was a dismissal if Futaba ever heard one. She shoved the rest of her food in her mouth, chewing as fast as she could as she gathered up her plates and took it over to the sink. Her stack wasn’t as neat as everyone else’s—it wobbled and clanked and her cup nearly fell out of her bowl—but she made it.

Then she hurried into the living room, where Kana was folding up her single other outfit. Futaba hadn’t peeked in her bag, but knew she had only brought two outfits, a light jacket, and several pairs of underwear and socks as her only clothes; the rest of the bag was filled with trinkets and books, and Futaba saw the ragged arm of a teddy bear sticking out behind it all. There was a stack of journals and notebooks on the table next to a small coin purse filled with crumpled yen bills.

Kana packed up the rest of her clothes, then dragged out the bear. As she hugged it, Futaba paused by the couch, Mona’s lashing tail visible from underneath it.

Was that where he’d been this whole time? Sleeping under the couch? Protecting Kana? If so, he was a better cat than monkey-boy gave him credit for, even if he didn’t like nearly everyone else he came across; Futaba saw his whiskers poking out as he watched Kana mumble away to her bear as if it were a god that could grant her wishes.

Maybe it could, if it was given enough love. Wasn’t there a story like that? Futaba couldn’t remember if that was the way it went, it had been so long since she had heard it, but things like that were easy enough to look up online.

Futaba didn’t interrupt her. Any kind of god that would listen to the pleas of a distraught child and answer them had to be dead—or so overwhelmed not every request would be answered. There had to be millions of kids across the globe treating their problems as if they were the end of the world, and hundreds of thousands of kids in worse situations than Kana’s.

But just in case, Futaba sent up a little wish of her own for Kana to stay safe and for everything to go smoothly.

Then she went back to her room, leaving Kana to her prayers.

* * *

Yuuki wasn’t sure what kind of outfit would be best for a meeting where he’d have to reject someone, so he went with the same as usual: an old, comfortable t-shirt and jeans, sneakers a little worse for wear but not ratty and duck-taped together like he’d seen on some of the poorer guys on campus.

(It was also the only kind of outfit he had, aside from a dress shirt and nice slacks in mourning black. Hirotaka had bought it for him the day after graduation since it wouldn’t be acceptable to wear his uniform anymore—as if Yuuki had attended any funerals, ever. It made him wonder how much of his family’s lives he’d missed out on, how many birthdays and reunions and marriages and deaths he had never been told about, how many people he was related to but would never know. He barely knew his own parents; how could he understand cousins and aunts and grandparents?)

He picked up Ryuji from the courtyard where he was busy running around with Suzuna on his shoulders, the toddler clinging to his hair for balance and squealing with glee. Yuuki would have let them play together a while longer, but Ryuji took one look at him as he came down the stairs and sobered up quick.

Suzuna’s mother bowed in gratitude from her spot by the flowerbeds, took her daughter back, and watched them leave.

“You sure, dude?” Ryuji asked, once he wasn’t waving goodbye to a crying child anymore.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Yuuki said.

“Thought you didn’t want anyone to make a fuss over ‘em.”

“He’s already made a fuss,” Yuuki told him. “There wasn’t anyone else around, but he still asked about them. I thought if he saw them himself, it might make him think twice.”

He expected the rings to swing freely—but they didn’t, even as he worried that someone would come by and try to take them. He had to shove his hands in his pockets, one curling around the phone there in a half-remembered habit and fell to tracing the lens of the camera.

It had been bugging him all morning. He had to ask, “Do you really think he wants to date me?”

“Yeah, I do,” Ryuji said. “Or, uh—‘date’ is the nice way to put it.”

Like that was going to make him feel better. Just the idea of anyone other than Akira wanting to date him made him feel queasy, antsy, his nerves alight with something raw that he couldn’t put a name to. It couldn’t be love. Love wasn’t supposed to make him feel sick.

“If you’d seen him, you’d think so, too,” Ryuji added when Yuuki grumbled nonsense deep in his throat. “And you did kiss him, so he’s probably got ideas.”

“He said ‘fuck’ the whole time and acted like the world would end,” Yuuki said.

“What’d you say before? That you thought you were straight ‘til you met Akira?”

That made Yuuki stop, right there in the middle of the sidewalk, forcing a couple to go around him; the girl looked back with a shit-eating grin on her face, ready to laugh, while her boyfriend ignored everything and tugged her along. Ryuji went a few more steps before realizing Yuuki wasn’t there anymore and turning around.

“Ryuji, I can’t—” he floundered, mind racing to find the words to say. He was just himself, just plain old boring Yuuki Mishima, former punching bag of an Olympic athlete and a nervous wreck of a nobody. There was nothing special about him. “I mean, I’m just—I can’t—there are way better people to have crushes on!”

“Like Akira,” Ryuji supplied.

“Yeah, like Akira,” Yuuki agreed. There were hundreds of people on the forum, too, who would agree that Akira was just the type of person who deserved a legion of fans at his beck and call. Yuuki wondered where those people were two or three or four years ago, when Akira needed them most. “So—so it doesn’t make sense that it’s me. Maybe—maybe it’s someone else, and I was just a test.”

That sounded much better. That also sounded not unlike Igarashi, back in eighth grade, who had once cornered Yuuki in a corner of an empty classroom just to stare at him. He hadn’t said a word the whole time and hadn’t done it ever again and if Yuuki hadn’t been terrified of being boxed in like that before, he was after.

His stomach dropped as the stray thought took hold. He’d thought Igarashi, like all of his other bullies, was out to hurt him, to wheedle out an errand or two to the threat of a few punches or kicks, but had he really—did he really want to—

Ryuji slung an arm around his shoulders, saying something about getting a seat at the station that Yuuki barely heard himself agree to. He was too busy telling himself that just because Igarashi _might_ have been considering kissing him didn’t mean that that was what he planned to do; maybe he was just trying to be threatening, maybe he was relishing in Yuuki’s fear all on his own for a while—but now the idea was there, and Yuuki couldn’t help but think of his eighth-grade self at Igarashi’s mercy in that empty classroom.

He’d been lucky that whatever it was that Igarashi had planned to do didn’t happen. He’d been lucky, because what if it had scared him off the idea for good, and then he’d turned Akira down or quit using the app, and then where would either of them be?

Alone. Lost. Miserable. Yuuki would likely be struggling to connect with girls from mixers—if he were invited—and struggling to find reasons to stay or leave. How he’d go along with whatever his friends—if he had any—liked, and how he’d never understand why.

“You okay there?” Ryuji asked, warm against his side.

“No,” Yuuki said.

“You wanna bail on him, then?”

Yuuki huffed out air. Just because some old memory reared its ugly head at exactly the wrong time, he’d make more trouble for himself later? “No. Just—just give me a minute.”

“You know, if only models ‘n actors scored dates, the human race woulda died off with the dinosaurs,” Ryuji said. “So you’re kinda plain. Who cares? Obviously there’s somebody attracted to that.”

“I just don’t understand where it’s coming from,” Yuuki admitted, because that was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? Plain, boring Yuuki suddenly winding up with suitors? He wasn’t living in a bad harem anime, was he? “Why—why so suddenly? Why now? Why _me_?”

“Maybe it’s ‘cause you’re not alone anymore.” Ryuji frowned in thought. “I mean, before you didn’t have anybody, right? And it’s like, people can sense that, so they steer clear even if they want to get to know ya; nobody wants to beat at a brick wall if it can’t come down or let them in, but then you met Akira, and he became somebody important to you—and it was like you were different. It wasn’t much, but it was enough, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Yuuki said, at a loss. Was it really that simple? Was he really so easy to read?

“Sure it was,” Ryuji said, and punctuated his statement with an elbow to Yuuki’s ribs. “‘Cause even if you were only going to keep busy once volleyball was shut down, you still came to the rehab center. You still sat with us and talked sometimes. Yusuke said once that he was surprised you kept going even after Suzui got discharged. Don’t that mean that you started caring, even a little?”

Yuuki fought back the urge to correct him: he hadn’t gone to the center just because he was bored or because he cared, he’d done it to keep his mother out of his hair. The less she saw him back then, the better; the less he saw her, the less anxiety he would have felt to be even remotely near her. She’d never apologized for walking in on him, or for yelling, or even for accusing him of doing drugs. In her mind, she didn’t have to, he supposed, but that didn’t make it better.

And he’d only kept going to keep from having to deal with her, sure that if she had him in the same building for longer than ten minutes she would sit him down across the table and spew even more accusations, and Yuuki hadn’t wanted to listen to her and her plans for his future.

But, still. He had kept going, even if it was for selfish reasons—and he hadn’t needed to sign up as a volunteer caregiver, either, but he had. “I guess so,” he said.

“And that makes you, you know, interesting,” Ryuji kept on, though it was obvious he was losing his train of thought. If ‘interesting’ was the word he was using, Yuuki had to question his vocabulary.

“Is this the part where you tell me that because I’m quiet and withdrawn, it makes me mysterious or some other bullshit?”

Ryuji snorted. “If you can snark like that at me, I think you’re good to go.”

But even as they got on the train, the thought stayed with him: that he was nothing more than a test dummy, a trial version, something for guys like Igarashi and Yamada to use up and then toss away once they got their answers. Someone plain and unassuming like Yuuki could never be a danger for their reputation, after all; they’d never have to worry about Yuuki going around and telling people they kissed him, because no one would believe him.

No one except Ryuji, at least.

To his relief, no one looked twice at him and his rings, and he brooded over what to say to Yamada over the ride; would Yamada be pushy, like the other times, or would he finally give and leave Yuuki alone? Could Yuuki even convince him to?

Could Yuuki convince him to do anything?

“Anyway, mysterious guys are just regular guys who sulk too much and stick to themselves,” Ryuji continued, once they were back on the street. “It’s normal to want to get to know somebody, then decide you wanna date ‘em. Nobody just goes up to somebody on the street and says, ‘Hey, you’re hot, date me.’”

That was true—Yuuki had certainly never seen it—and even the recipients of love letters back in high school had the rumor mill working in their favor. He could have gotten to know anyone popular enough without ever speaking a word to them himself—but that was the caveat: only the popular kids. Kids like Yuuki who got beaten daily or weren’t good-looking enough or had some other problem that made them social outcasts never had to deal with the unwanted advances of the masses.

For the first time in his life, Yuuki realized it must suck to be popular. The thought made him laugh; Ryuji looked over, confusion in his furrowed brows.

“I just thought it must suck to be one of the few guys that actually happens to,” Yuuki said.

Ryuji’s mouth quirked. “Yeah, it must, huh.”

Yamada had mentioned that, despite it being Sunday, he was waiting in one of the lounges on campus. Ryuji didn’t even pause outside the gates, strutting inside as if he was one of the many, many students, and it was only once they were past a few trees and safely out of view of the gate that Ryuji asked, “So, uh, where’re we going?”

Yuuki pointed to a building that wouldn’t have been unlike the rest if not for the fact that one wall was nothing but glass, safety-inspected and tempered to withstand even the headlong charge of an eighteen-wheel truck; sometimes Yuuki wondered what he would ever do with that information, but the answer became clear when he mentioned it offhand and got to watch Ryuji gape at it, a strangled noise coming out of his throat.

“Oh, yeah,” Ryuji said, stopping once they were within view of the doors. “Do ya want me to wait out here? If you wanna talk about, you know—”

Things like kissing Yamada and how it was a complete mistake. Things like Akira and how Yuuki was waiting—impatiently or not—for him to come home.

(It was weird to hear Ryuji lumping in kissing with grinding on him, but one was worse than the other even though both made Yuuki’s cheeks burn with shame. He just wished he knew which one was worse. It felt like they both were.)

“I’d like it if you came,” Yuuki said. He tried focusing on the flowerbeds, where the plants were starting to wither. They were overwatered after months of near-daily rain and barely any sun, and Yuuki imagined their roots rotting after spending so long in the dark. “I don’t want to get caught up in his flow, and I don’t want to wind up agreeing to something I don’t mean to because he’s pushy about it. Just, um, try not to get mad at him, okay?”

“Yeah,” Ryuji said, “though I can’t promise not to get pissed at him.”

“I think I’m mad enough for us both right now.”

“Nah, I’ve seen you mad, and this ain’t it.”

“Anger’s not just yelling and screaming.” Anger was also the blank indifference Yuuki forced himself to show when pouring it out would get him in trouble; it was the bitter tang of acid in his throat, and the clenching of teeth, and the simmering silence because any word he spoke threatened to be just on the wrong side of civil. Anger was avoidance, whenever he could manage it. “You’ve seen me mad like this before, you just didn’t know it then. Just—just let me talk to him, and you can jump in if he starts interrupting or something. Okay?”

Ryuji took a moment to think that over, but finally nodded.

Yuuki nodded back, then went inside, the cool air near to freezing after so long out in the heat. Yamada was supposedly on the third floor, and Yuuki headed for the stairs knowing that Ryuji would prefer it to waiting for the elevator; looking around at the near-empty floor, he was suddenly glad Ryuji hadn’t insisted on staying outside.

There was no one else here. It was shaping up to be Igarashi all over again.

Yuuki shuddered and chalked it up to the air conditioning.

Yamada was waiting for them at a table covered in books and papers, his laptop resting on a book as he typed. Yuuki had never seen him wearing glasses before, but plenty of guys his age ruined their eyesight studying too much in the dark—or maybe they were for the screen. Yuuki wasn’t sure and didn’t want to ask, even when Yamada glanced up at their arrival.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t even look all that happy to be there, waiting for them.

“Mishima,” he said, shutting his laptop. “And—um.”

“Ryuji’s not my boyfriend, before you think he’s here to pummel you,” Yuuki said. “Can we sit down?”

“I—yeah, of course you can.”

Yuuki noted the way Yamada eyed Ryuji as he sat down, all wariness and hesitation. “If he’s not your boyfriend, why did you bring him?” Yamada asked, stuffing his glasses in a case.

“Moral support,” Yuuki said. “Akira’s—my boyfriend, he’s not doing so well. The last I heard from him is that he was heading out for surgery somewhere overseas.”

“Oh,” Yamada said. His hands were shaking as they set the case down, picking up some papers to straighten. “That’s, uh—that’s awful. I mean, it’s awful that you haven’t heard from him.”

Yamada, stalling? What in the world happened?

“Yeah,” Yuuki said. “So—what did you want to talk about?”

Yamada froze. Yuuki could practically hear the gears in his head grinding to a halt. He glanced from the table, to Yuuki, to Ryuji, and back again.

“I already told Ryuji,” Yuuki told him, and Ryuji nodded.

“I—Is that so? Wonderful. No need to go over it, then,” Yamada said.

“No need to?” Did he want to gloss over it? Ignore it? Why were they here, if all he wanted to do was ignore that it had happened?

“Right! No need to go over it. We can just call it a mistake, you know?”

“Dude,” Ryuji said, “it was just a kiss. I thought Yuuki would be freaking out about it, but he’s way more calm than you are.”

“We’re adults,” Yamada said, staring at his textbook. “We need to start thinking of settling down, don’t we, and we can’t do that if we’re, well, fooling around like this.”

Yuuki didn’t bring up the fact that he’d been into it until they were interrupted. Yuuki definitely didn’t bring up the fact that, as soon as he’d seen them here, Yamada had gone pale.

“No, I—I wanted to apologize, Mishima, for making you think I wanted to—well, you know,” Yamada said. “I thought I was just being friendly, but maybe it was a bit much, especially since you’re…”

Ryuji’s jaw clenched as Yamada trailed off, what went unsaid so obvious it was as if someone had screamed it from the rooftop.

But Yuuki said, “In a committed relationship, yes.”

Ryuji gave him a look that screamed _really?_

And the answer Yuuki so desperately wanted to give him was _yes, really_. Yamada had wanted to see him—Yamada had wanted to talk about last night—but as soon as someone else stepped in, he clammed up. There was no way for him to know that Ryuji would never gossip, so he was trying to play it off as an accident.

Ryuji must have noticed because he sighed, then buried his face in his hands. “You know, I’m—I’m pretty thirsty. Think I’m gonna go have some water. There’s a bathroom nearby, right?”

Yamada rattled off directions and they watched him go; Akira’s ring was a warm weight in Yuuki’s hand by then, and without his shirt in the way he could slide his finger through it until the chain caught on his skin.

“So, uh,” Yuuki said once he was gone, “I’m sorry. For last night. I—I—well, I thought if I did you wouldn’t want to talk to me anymore. No more mixer invites when I didn’t want to go in the first place, no more weird looks across the classroom, none of it.”

“I’ve never given you weird looks,” Yamada said.

“You have,” Yuuki said. “It’s—it’s not all the time, but sometimes when I notice you’ve got this look like you’ve been staring for a while, and that’s pretty weird.”

It was odd. Ryuji had made him think he was going to have to turn down a confession, but here was Yamada, trying to act like this was the first he was hearing about his own actions. Here was Yamada, trying to play what they did off as the silly actions of a pair of children who didn’t know any better.

But Yuuki had known better. Yuuki had known better for days.

“And—the other day, when we met on the street, that was weird, too,” he went on. “You get all close like that and I don’t know what to think. So—that’s another reason. I didn’t want to have to keep guessing at what you might or might not have wanted or meant by it. That gets old really fast.”

Yamada’s mouth opened, then closed, something like guilt creeping into his expression.

“There was a bunch of other stuff I wanted to say, but now I can’t remember what it is,” Yuuki admitted. “It’s just, I didn’t like the stuff you were doing, but I didn’t think you’d listen if I asked you to stop. You’re barely listening now, after all.”

“I am listening,” Yamada argued. He stared down at his textbooks for a bit, then brought his gaze back up. “I shouldn’t have pressured you so much, either, Mishima. I already told you that I know what it’s like to be lonely, didn’t I, so I also should have known better than to push it so hard. We could have done study groups instead, or—well, anything else. And, I, well.”

Well what? Yuuki wanted to ask, but knew the look on Yamada’s face: he was searching for what to say next, for whatever excuse he was going to use. He was serious the whole time—had been serious for the entire exchange—and that serious look almost drew Yuuki in far more than his friendly smiles ever had. He looked like a person, now that he wasn’t forcing himself to be happy.

No one could be happy all the time, after all.

“We’re classmates,” Yamada finally said, “so I just thought we should get along.”

“We have _one_ class together,” Yuuki reminded him, to which Yamada shrugged.

“That doesn’t mean we aren’t classmates, even if it’s for one class,” he said. “I suppose—I went without friends for so long that now that I have some, I want as many as possible. I know it’s a bit greedy, but it’s what I want. Can we—can we at least be friends, Mishima? Can we try?”

There was something he wasn’t saying, and Yuuki could guess that it had to do with the look Yamada had supposedly given him last night at the station. If it had anything to do with what he’d told Ryuji earlier—that they weren’t kids anymore and shouldn’t be fooling around—then Yuuki shouldn’t say no. Yuuki should at least try to give him an ounce of courage to admit whatever it was that he was pretending didn’t exist, instead of cramming whatever he’d felt last night into the deepest pit in his mind.

Yamada wasn’t so deep in denial that he’d shoved Yuuki away and cursed at him, after all. He had taken everything he wanted and practically begged for more—until they were seen, until someone had noticed, and then whatever wall that had come down had slammed right back up.

Yuuki pitied him. He’d felt the same way, once—shoving his feelings down until they couldn’t bother him anymore, shoving his words down so they wouldn’t hurt anyone else—and then he’d met Akira, and none of it had mattered.

But at the same time, he didn’t want to say yes and open himself up to problems in the future—but Yamada was giving him some kicked-puppy look, probably without even realizing it, and it was entirely possible that Yuuki would be the only one of his friends to understand this particular issue. Yuuki would be the only one Yamada could talk to about this, if he ever wanted to.

Could he really toss Yamada to the angry wolf that was society like that? Could he really sit back and let him wonder and agonize and make himself miserable as he struggled to shape himself into the person he thought he had to be?

Yuuki couldn’t. He couldn’t do that, puppy-eyes or no. “Sure,” he sighed at last, and Yamada let out a sigh of relief that made his shoulders sag.

“Thank you,” Yamada said. “And, in the meantime—”

“I won’t tell anybody,” Yuuki promised, and watched Yamada grin, lightly. Had he really worked himself up over this? “Just—promise me that whenever you want to talk again, you’ll come to me. I won’t—I won’t judge.”

“You’re a good guy, Mishima,” Yamada said softly.

Yuuki didn’t think he was. He was stupid, and trusting, and so starved for any kind of love that he was willing to force himself on others at the slightest hint of interest. He was the kind of person who yelled at the boy who saved his life. He wasn’t fit to be anyone’s love, much less Akira’s.

“Ryuji’s taking a while,” Yuuki said, just so he wouldn’t have to answer. The hallway they had directed Ryuji down was empty; maybe he’d gotten lost on his way back. “I should, um, go see what’s taking him.”

“Sure,” Yamada said. “I’ll see you in class, then. And, Mishima?”

“Yeah?”

“I, ah—I hope everything’s alright. With your boyfriend.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said, one thumb rubbing the etching on Akira’s ring. “Me, too.”

He left Yamada at his table and headed to the bathroom, where he found Ryuji standing at the water fountain, frowning at his phone. There was a hideous orange painting on the wall opposite him; Yuuki stopped to try and appreciate it while Ryuji thought, but between the liberal use of neon paint and the color of the wall behind it, found himself cringing.

It hurt to look at. Yusuke would hate it, then try to pick apart the painter’s thought process, as if understanding would somehow make it more appealing. He reached for his phone.

“Don’t,” Ryuji said, shoving his phone away. “I already tried it, but he’s not answering.”

“Maybe he’s at work,” Yuuki suggested.

“You said he was at that mixer last night, yeah? He’s not the type to stay out late if he has plans in the morning.” Ryuji’s frown deepened, and for once Yuuki could see the concern written there.

“You can go check on him,” he offered, but Ryuji shook his head.

“We already made plans, man. I’m not gonna bail on ya, I told ya that.” He scuffed his shoe across the floor, the resulting squeal as offensive to the ears as the painting was to Yuuki’s eyes. “I’ll go and see him tomorrow. Maybe he got sick or he’s in an art funk or something. You know how he is.”

He did. Yuuki could be the same way at times—hadn’t he shut the world out just a few days ago, and all because of a single video in his gallery? Hadn’t he taken some time to want the world to bother him again?

And Yusuke had been raised to be that way, shutting people out to work when the stress got to be too much. Yusuke had been trained to ignore his own needs in order to provide, and while he’d been better about it, Yuuki still worried. There was every chance Yusuke would relapse into those old, destructive habits Madarame had drilled into him, and none of his friends would ever be the wiser.

But tomorrow—

“I already made plans for tomorrow,” Yuuki said. “I’m, uh, going to be out of town for the next few days, actually.”

“Huh,” Ryuji said with a grin. “Never thought you’d be the type to take a vacation.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki agreed, because it wasn’t exactly a vacation, was it? Visiting Akira’s parents, visiting his hometown—it was more like a boyfriend study retreat than anything else.

He thought Ryuji would ask where he was going, but he didn’t, slinging an arm around Yuuki’s shoulders, still with that grin on his face. “Well, I guess I’m going alone, then—you know, maybe it’s guy stuff. Maybe he fell for somebody at that mixer.”

Yuuki doubted that. If Yusuke was in love, surely he would have told his friends—unless Yusuke had fallen for that Togo girl. But why would he let her go to a mixer in the first place, then? If he wanted her attention, why had he given away his seat to protect Yuuki?

Had Yuuki—had Yuuki ruined some plan of his? Or had Yuuki been a part of it?

Or was he thinking too much, trying to find what wasn’t there, trying to frame it in a way that didn’t make him feel alone?

“Maybe,” Yuuki said.

And as Ryuji grinned some more, rattling on in his ear about their plans for the rest of the day, Yuuki found himself wishing he could go, instead of visiting the Amamiyas—but Yusuke had survived without him for a while, hadn’t he? And if they all showed up, would they overwhelm him?

Yuuki couldn’t be sure, but hoped Yusuke was okay.

* * *

Taishi Yamada watched Mishima leave, eyes trained on him until he turned a corner.

It would be so easy to chase after him, to catch up, to grab hold of his shoulders—so slim!—and turn him. It would be so easy to then bask in his brief surprise as Taishi leaned in close, closer—

“So,” Yamamoto said, taking a seat and grimacing at the warmth still left there, “how was it? Was it him?”

“Oh, no,” Taishi said, forcing himself to breathe. Act normal, act like he wasn’t contemplating shoving his classmate and newfound, tentative friend up against another wall. It had to be hormones talking. No one had ever kissed him like they meant it before. “Not him. He’s spoken for.”

“Just because he’s spoken for doesn’t mean it can’t be him,” Yamamoto said.

“Okay, well,” Taishi said, digging for a notebook. “I did some digging, and unless he’s going out to Sapporo every weekend to work on his site, it can’t be him.”

“Sakakibara already checked Sapporo. He nearly got arrested for it, remember?”

“Sakakibara is an idiot who can’t even spell; I’m not surprised he almost got arrested.”

“He did more than you,” Yamamoto said. “So, seriously, _why_ can’t it be him?”

Because it couldn’t. Taishi didn’t want it to be him, and that was as simple as it got; Yamamoto, however, would never take that for an answer.

Yamamoto huffed. “I’ll up the stakes, then.”

“Up them? Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure,” Yamamoto said, and grinned at him. She was like a shark, scenting blood in the water and going in for the kill, and Taishi shrank back.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Oh,” said Yamamoto, “then I guess you want everyone to know you slept with Mr. Sudo back in high school, huh?”

Damn her. Was she really going to lie to get what she wanted? “I never did that,” he protested, despite the blood in his veins running cold. It made his voice weak. He cursed at its quiver.

“They don’t know that, do they? And it’s not like you talk about high school much, here, right? So who’s to say I’m wrong and you didn’t?”

“Who’s to say you won’t decide I’m lying if it still turns out it’s not him?”

She grinned again. Yamada didn’t quite understand what the big deal was, or what any of this was all about, but she was willing to lie to find out what she wanted. “You can’t quit now, Tai-tai. I’ll tell them if you do, and then you’ll be alone again, just like you were before.”

That wasn’t true. He wouldn’t be alone; Mishima, he thought, would stick with him. Mishima would understand, and then Mishima would hold him—

Except, he shouldn’t want Mishima to hold him. He should want a girl like Yamamoto or Segawa to. He should want to work harder to earn their respect. He should want to work harder to make one of them see him as a good boyfriend.

Then, maybe, his mother would look at him with pride in her eyes. Then, maybe, he wouldn’t be ignored on his visits home. Then, maybe, _finally_ , he’d be somebody.

“Fine,” he said. He was tired of being nobody. He was tired of being Taishi the outcast, Taishi the forgotten. If it turned out that Mishima was the Yuuki Yamamoto and her weird group of friends was looking for, Taishi would finally have a girlfriend.

“Great!” Yamamoto said, and flounced over to his seat. She curled her arms around his neck, pressed a kiss to his cheek, and slipped a piece of paper under his collar. When she backed up her nose was scrunched up like she smelled something awful, even though Taishi had kept a rigorous hygiene regimen for years. He never smelled except after gym.

His skin crawled long after she left. The piece of paper burned a hole straight through him until he snatched it out of his collar; it was the bill from the diner last night, with his and Yamamoto’s meals circled in red pen. There was a note scrawled on the back: **I don’t care what you do to find out. Just do it.**

He sighed. Just another thing to add to the list of what made Taishi Yamada a worthless human being.

Then he buried his head in his hands and wondered if it would ever be over.


	15. Summer Vacation, Monday

“ _You see, the truth is that I couldn’t trust you,”_ Akira explained. The mind-Akira, at least; the real one wouldn’t remember exactly what had happened, just that the two of them had jumped a hurdle.

Maybe it would help close the distance between them just a bit. Maybe it would be the trigger that would set Akira off the path of self-destruction; his friends had gone off to that far-distant planet, and the ones that stayed behind had advised him to rest and recover and prepare himself however he could for the battles to come as they awaited their return.

Apparently that meant getting into as many fights as possible and honing his ability to sing while under the immense pressure of having dozens of hostile creatures trying to kill him. But he had trusted the robot—and Yusuke—for this long, hadn’t he?

_“But…_ _I get the feeling you can’t trust me, either. Am I wrong?”_

_Or not_ , Yusuke thought with a sigh.

But there was nothing wrong with being honest, here. There was surely nothing wrong with admitting that he simply couldn’t focus on Akira and the strange goings-on of the beings in another dimension when he could barely focus on himself. Yuuki and Nakanohara and work and his classes took up most of his time, to the point that Yusuke often forgot what he was supposed to be doing when going back into the app.

But after Saturday, Yusuke feared it would be impossible for him to set foot outside his door until he had to. Definitely not for the rest of the vacation, and definitely not to see what had gotten Ryuji so worked up yesterday.

 _“_ _Or,”_ the mental-Akira continued, _“maybe it’s not that you don’t trust me, but… You don’t like me. Why would you stay if you don’t like me?”_

His choices at this point were supposed to be inconsequential. No matter what he said, the mental-Akira would still pass through the door that was waiting and learn stronger Song Magic.

But these felt very consequential.

 **Of course I like you** , said one.

 **I’m not doing this for you** , said the other.

No one on Yuuki’s forum had mentioned this. No one had ever mentioned being asked outright if they liked Akira—or, it wasn’t supposed to happen until later, until Yusuke could Dive even deeper into his soul.

This meant something. Yusuke just couldn’t be sure of what.

But he couldn’t lie.

He chose the second one. The mental-Akira’s face was like a door slamming shut: one second open and inviting, and the next closed off and guarded.

_“_ _Not for me? Then, why? Is it for entertainment? Are you that bored that you thought it’d be fun to help me—help us?”_

**This game isn’t even that fun** , said one.

 **There are people who miss you** , said the other.

It was odd, how the app could tell the diverging paths his mind took. The app wasn’t a game—not to Yusuke, and not to Yuuki and the others—which, well, it couldn’t be fun. Every choice Yusuke made could be the difference between life and death for real, living people.

He had to take it seriously.

He chose the second one.

The mental version of Akira gasped, and pressed his hands to his chest, gripping at the fabric there to keep from tearing at his hair. He worried at his fingers, and thought and thought.

_“_ _You know who I am, there?”_

**Yes.**

_“_ _You know who Goro is, too?”_

**Yes.**

_“_ _I—oh,”_ the mental-Akira breathed. Static erupted over the screen; the tranquil background of the door to nowhere on its grassy hill was interrupted with blades of grass that had turned into black stalks with code running through it. A cloud tore a hole in the sky. _“You—oh. Oh.”_

Yusuke watched and waited as he collected himself; the gaps in the background not so much fixing themselves but becoming part of it: the cloud shading itself a stormy gray as code played over it like lightning, the blades of grass turning yellow, as if to mimic the play of sunlight through trees.

 _“_ _You’re really here to help me?”_ the mental-Akira asked again at last. _“To help us?”_

**Yes.**

Because it was clear that no one else was up to the task. Because it was clear that everyone was interested in the mystery of the admin of the forum, and not why a pair of missing children were in a game on their phones.

Not a game—a portal, a window to another world.

No one could _see_ that.

But the mental-Akira smiled at him, thankful just for the truth or for the help, and said, _“I see. I’m glad, then, that you’ve stuck with me this far. Let’s do our best next time, too, okay?”_

Next time. Right. Yusuke had yet more of this to look forward to.

**Of course.**

Akira walked through the door on the hill as it glowed with its own light, and Yusuke glanced at the clock.

It was far later in the morning than he realized. He should have been up an hour ago, eating breakfast with Nakanohara before he went to work, but he hadn’t had the energy, and Nakanohara hadn’t called for him, hadn’t pestered him to get out of bed and try to eat something, hadn’t so much as checked on him to make sure he was still breathing.

There was a moment after he had gotten home where he had lain in the quiet, dark hours of early morning and felt as if time had stopped and he had frozen in it, becoming the only man on Earth to die of a broken heart—but that had been a dream, in the end. Yusuke was alive. His heart still beat blood throughout his veins and his eyes still called up tears when he dared to look at the trio of paintings in the corner. It didn’t matter that his stomach was woefully empty and his bladder impossibly full; he did not want to move an inch from his bed and its embrace, where beautiful creatures like Yuuki didn’t exist.

If he didn’t leave, he wouldn’t have to hurt. This was likely the reason Madarame hadn’t wanted him to socialize too much; if he did, he would get attached, and when he discovered the true nature of mankind he would languish like this.

Madarame had known.

(Madarame had caused it. Yusuke knew that, and yet his mind still insisted.)

And Nakanohara had survived his own heartbreak; so had countless others throughout the ages, for where there was love there was, inevitably, the loss of it.

A clatter from the kitchen broke his concentration. He moved the robot over to a save point, closed the app, and tried to find decent excuses—or, failing that, apologies—as he made his way to the kitchen, where there was a furious muttering coming from the other side of the island separating the dining table from the cooking area.

“Shit, shit; eff, it’s all over the place—”

“What,” Yusuke said, thought it came out of his throat a croak, like a rusty hinge, squeaking and squealing in its first breeze in centuries.

It had only been a day, and yet he felt as if he hadn’t spoken for years.

“Hey, man,” Ryuji said, with pity on his face. His grin lacked its usual exuberance. It made Yusuke’s heart race. “Sorry ‘bout the mess.”

It was only then that Yusuke noticed the porridge spilled over the floor. It had splattered up the cabinets and dripped from the underside of the countertop, where the overturned pot sat.

“Why,” Yusuke said. Then he cleared his throat and tried again. “Why are you here?”

“‘Cause I’m worried about you,” Ryuji said. “That Naka guy—when I showed up he said you barely came outta your room yesterday ‘n I tried to text you this awful painting I saw, but you never answered and it made me worried, dude.”

“It was only a day,” Yusuke said.

“Yeah, it was. But you haven’t been alright for a while now—so I figured I’d stop by and see what you were up to and, you know, if you were okay.”

Yusuke could think of nothing to say to that. He wasn’t okay—that much would likely be obvious even to total strangers—but to involve Ryuji in this mess… To even so much as insinuate that Yuuki could be anything but faithful…

Would Ryuji believe him? Who in the world would believe that of such a good friend?

“But, uh, first—you got any rags?”

Right, the porridge. “Of course,” Yusuke said, and brought him a stack and helped him clean, Ryuji protesting with every mushy handful they dumped in the trash.

 _What a waste_ , Yusuke thought, wondering if it was still edible—it had only fallen to the floor, after all, and Nakanohara kept his floors clean—but shook away the thought. Ryuji would be disgusted if he ate it; anyone would be, to learn he’d done such a thing.

But it was such a waste. A perfectly good meal tossed away because of a few specks of dirt.

“Right,” Ryuji said, spooning out what was left in the pot and giving the bowl to Yusuke. “I’ll make some more, so just eat that and hold a bit, okay? Or do ya want something else?”

“Eggs,” Yusuke said. The bowl was warm, even if it was barely half-full, and it smelled heavenly. “And rice.”

“Got it,” Ryuji said. He wandered over to the fridge; Yusuke took a seat at the table and tried savoring what little food he’d been given—and failed, because soon after the bowl was empty and his stomach was clamoring for more.

As if by magic, eggs and toast appeared. He could hear the rice cooker simmering, the sizzle of more eggs as they hit the pan, the clack of a plate as Ryuji set it down. Yusuke took his time with this plate; he knew how bad the cramps and pain would be if he ate too much too quickly after having nothing at all, and didn’t want to wind up in bed for a different kind of pain.

“So, uh,” Ryuji said, once all the dishes were on the table: rice and small salads and his own eggs and toast and a refill for Yusuke, who discovered that his stomach was, in essence, a black hole. “You okay?”

Denying it didn’t seem to be the correct course of action. Ryuji had come here because he was worried, because he had cause to worry, and like last time wasn’t likely to leave until he was satisfied. It also seemed as if he could sniff out a lie from a mile away. “No, I am not.”

“Yeah,” Ryuji said, “I thought as much. Yuuki said you went to that mixer he was at Saturday night; I didn’t think you had it in ya.”

“An old classmate and newfound friend of mine invited me to go,” Yusuke explained, piling lettuce on his toast and his eggs on top of that. He didn’t much like lettuce on its own, and disguising the taste of it seemed to be the only way he could eat it. “She only wanted a familiar face nearby, someone she knew and could talk to. I didn’t expect Yuuki to be there.”

Ryuji shrugged. “Some guy kept bugging him to go. He got him to agree to it just once.”

“It is never just once.”

“I think this time it will be,” Ryuji said.

Yamada and Yuuki, pressed up against the wall. How long they had spent in the restroom together, doing who knew what. Yuuki hadn’t been wearing his rings, either, just like at the beach.

Had he—had he already decided to toss Akira away? Is that why he had agreed to go to the mixer—because it meant he could have more time with that Yamada boy?

“What makes you so sure?” Yusuke asked.

“I—you know, they talked some shit out,” Ryuji said, and tried to stall by stuffing his face. Yusuke waited as he chewed with an expression that said he was breaking some law, or some rule, just by speaking of it. “Yamada’s not gonna bug him to go to any more mixers, though.”

Because they’d be too busy going on dates to go to mixers. How could Ryuji not see that—or did he know, and was trying to save Yusuke the pain of knowing he hadn’t been chosen yet again?

He wanted to laugh. Instead, he said, “You don’t need to lie for my sake.”

“I don’t—huh?”

“Or perhaps Yuuki is the one lying to you,” Yusuke mused, “but it’s all the same in the end, isn’t it? He has this Yamada now. I truly have no chance.”

“Dude, no—”

“Yes,” Yusuke said, with just the right amount of bite to it. It was the same tone he’d often used on nosy reporters who came snooping around the atelier; Madarame had been proud of it, in his own way. “It is obvious: in attempting to ease my own suffering of loving him and knowing it could never be, I gave him the space he needed to—to run off with someone else. Someone who isn’t Akira. Surely you know what that means, Ryuji.”

“I know you’ve got some kinda weird idea in your head,” Ryuji said. “You think Yuuki’s dating that Yamada guy? Really?”

Ryuji was never the type to understand without having it spelled out for him. “They left the mixer early after spending nearly fifteen minutes in the restroom together,” Yusuke told him. “When I worried after Yuuki and got permission to leave myself, I saw—I saw them—”

Ryuji’s face softened, not unlike Nakanohara’s had—but it was subtly different, something in his eyes belying the truth of this whole situation: there was only one reason that Ryuji, who had learned to leave Yusuke be most of the time at the rehab center, was here. He wasn’t worried something had happened at the mixer; he was worried how Yusuke would take the news.

That, too, was obvious. Yusuke stared down at his plate—at the shine of grease on his eggs, at the deep, deep greens of the lettuce—and noticed how his hands clenched.

He had been betrayed—and by his own friends, no less.

“You knew,” he said.

“Yuuki told me.”

“You knew,” Yusuke said again, because that was all it boiled down to: Ryuji knew, had known this whole time, and he hadn’t said a word. He had let Yusuke believe he had a chance.

“Yusuke, dude,” Ryuji said, still with that soft, pitying look on his face.

“I don’t want to hear whatever it is you have to say,” Yusuke told him. “You knew, and yet you kept it from me. Did you laugh about it when I wasn’t looking? Did it bring you joy to see me suffer? Is that why?”

 _Why you stayed, why you kept coming back, why you dragged me around by the nose when you knew—you_ knew _—_

“Damn you!” he said, at the same time Ryuji shouted, “Calm down, man!”

“It ain’t like that!” Ryuji went on, but Yusuke could barely hear him over the sound of Madarame’s voice in his ears, that gentle crooning only his former master had ever been capable of.

 _“_ _Didn’t I warn you, Yusuke,”_ as Ryuji raged on the other side of the table, _“that only I am truly on your side? That others only want to use you? That you’re nothing to them but a tool?”_

Just a tool. Just a source of entertainment.

Nakanohara, try as he might, couldn’t keep the words of the public out of Yusuke’s reach: people like Yusuke were funny, comedic; people like Yusuke made for good material for quick, silly arcs in dramas; people like Yusuke got what they deserved in the end, and good riddance.

“Fuck, man,” Ryuji said, winding down, “I told you I was worried about you! I’m not conspiring or—or any of that! I didn’t tell Yuuki you like him, did I?”

“As if I could keep loving such a—such a whore,” Yusuke spat. Bile rose in his throat.

Ryuji’s eyes narrowed. His voice went low and dangerous. “Yusuke. Don’t you dare say another fucking thing except to take that back.”

Yusuke drew himself up, until he had to stare down his nose to get a good look at Ryuji’s face, red with anger, his teeth bared in a scowl. “I will not.”

“Yusuke,” Ryuji warned.

“When they came out of that restroom, Ryuji, his face was flushed and his hair was mussed,” Yusuke said, a perverse pleasure coiling in his gut at the confusion flitting across Ryuji’s face. “I’ll admit my own naivete in thinking he’d been ill, but after stumbling upon them in that alley, I can only come to the conclusion—”

“Don’t,” Ryuji growled.

Yusuke didn’t quite care what he wanted. Not anymore. “—that they had to have had—”

With a roar, Ryuji launched himself across the table to snatch up fistfuls of Yusuke’s shirt. Dishes broke or were pushed aside to crash against the floor; Ryuji’s face was so close to his Yusuke could count every pore, every old nick and scar, could see the flecks of gold in his eyes. The table groaned under his weight.

“You’re a goddamn moron!” he yelled. Spittle landed on Yusuke’s chin. “Do you really think Yuuki’d shack up with _anybody_? Do you _really_ think they were fucking around in a public bathroom? What the hell is _wrong_ with you?”

“I know what I saw,” Yusuke said.

“You didn’t see _shit_ ,” Ryuji seethed. “Take it back, Yusuke. _Now_.”

“I will _not_. I know what I saw, and it most definitely was not Yuuki being faithful—”

Ryuji roared again, and shook him, and flung back a hand balled into a fist. Yusuke stared at it as it hung there, shaking; Ryuji panted and grit his teeth and looked to be in sheer agony.

Any other day, and Yusuke would have worried for him, but this was not any other day.

“Do it,” Yusuke dared him.

“Fuck you,” Ryuji said. “You don’t know the first thing about what he went through because of that Yamada guy. You don’t. Fuck, _I_ don’t. But he’s hurting and we need to be there for him; you’re hurting and I’m _trying_ to be here for you, but not if you’re gonna call Yuuki a—a whore for making _one_ fucking mistake, Yusuke.”

“That doesn’t change what he did.”

“You don’t know that!” Ryuji said. “You don’t know what he did, not for sure! I don’t even know all of it, but that don’t mean I gotta toss him aside for not talking about it yet!”

Yusuke stared, at a loss for words. Ryuji didn’t understand; if he’d seen what Yusuke had seen, he would, but he hadn’t.

“The only ones who should care about whether or not he’s being faithful is him and Akira,” Ryuji went on, spurred on by his silence. “We don’t gotta stick our noses into it.”

His fist dropped. The bunch of shirt he had a death grip on came loose.

“Yusuke, dude,” Ryuji said, softly at last. “You’re the last person who should be taking what this looks like at face value. Can’t you give him time to explain it to ya?”

He couldn’t. If Yusuke had to look in Yuuki’s face as he lied to him—if he had to see exactly what kind of liar Yuuki was, if he had to watch Yuuki put on crocodile tears for the sake of forgiveness—then Yusuke would believe every word. He was a fool in love, after all.

“I know what I saw,” Yusuke repeated, and watched the pain as it tore through Ryuji.

“Shit, man. You really believe that.”

Whatever fire he’d had was gone, extinguished as quickly as it came, and Ryuji carefully got off the tabletop. One of his knees dripped egg yolk; there was a piece of lettuce stuck to his sock.

He said nothing else as he left, leaving the mess and Yusuke behind.

For some reason, it felt as if he had taken a piece of Yusuke with him.

The food was still there, half-eaten and crushed under Ryuji’s weight or dashed to the floor and mixed with shards of porcelain. Yusuke should throw it away—and maybe he would, for the ones that were on the floor and therefore too dangerous to eat.

It would be a waste, otherwise.

* * *

Yuuki stepped off the train and into sunshine, the station platform’s roof doing little to give him any shade. Over by a pillar were the Amamiyas, and Mrs. Amamiya opened her arms and enveloped him in a hug that might have lasted a lifetime if her husband hadn’t pulled her away.

They were the only ones at the station. Yuuki could barely feel conspicuous, though, with the empty platform and the empty street and Mr. Amamiya taking his bag and stowing it in the only waiting car.

“So,” Mrs. Amamiya asked, “what would you like to do first?”

He didn’t know. Akira had never talked about his time as Ren Amamiya, except for the bit of his life anyone could have looked up online: the arrest, the trial, the charges, how his parents had kicked him out of the house and he’d vanished into thin air. Yuuki doubted they would know Ren’s favorite spots, or where he liked to spend his time after school when he wasn’t at practice, or even if he did either of those things, or had them.

Ren hadn’t exactly been popular here, before his arrest and disappearance.

“I’m not sure,” Yuuki said.

“Dear,” Mr. Amamiya said, “I don’t think a couple of old folk like us will know the best places for Mishima here to visit.”

“I was kind of planning on walking around, actually,” Yuuki admitted. “But, I, uh—I should know where your house is, and uh, that train ride really has me beat, so…”

Even catching the earliest train here, it had still been almost twelve hours. He was almost surprised the sun wasn’t setting by now, but caught the first glimpses of gold and orange as Mr. Amamiya drove them into town.

And he could see the posters, too, plastered in store windows and on poles, across fences and dividing walls. Ren and Goro stared out at the world at large, faces locked into smiles and innocent to their fate.

“No one wants to take them down,” Mrs. Amamiya said. “It’s helping Emiko, but…”

She reached out to her husband, who took one hand off the steering wheel to hold hers.

“It’s hard for them, too,” Mr. Amamiya said. “They feel like they failed Ren; they closed their eyes and ears and let money speak greater volumes than it should, and look what happened.”

“They don’t,” Mrs. Amamiya argued. “Mrs. Sawaguchi down the road said—”

“Mrs. Sawaguchi is never happy with what anyone is doing, dear. You said so yourself.”

“I did, but—but that doesn’t mean it hurts any less.”

“What did she say?” Yuuki asked.

Their hands squeezed each other. Mrs. Amamiya twisted hers to lace their fingers together. “That he deserved it,” she said. “That anyone who goes missing deserves what’s coming for them. That anyone who can’t follow the law deserves what’s coming for them.” She laughed. “She didn’t seem to care that she was contradicting herself, or that some of those missing people are babies or the elderly or kids who can’t even fend for themselves. She didn’t care for our Ren, not one bit.”

“She doesn’t care for anyone,” Mr. Amamiya added. “She’s pushed all of her family away by saying things like this, but she’s got a sizable backing in the community. I’m just glad they’re being drowned out by the younger ones who are saying it’s wrong to think that way.”

“Because Ren helped them. They know he’s a good kid, they just—couldn’t do anything when it mattered, and now that it doesn’t…”

It seemed to Yuuki that they were only taking advantage of the situation; they drove by a spot on a fence marked with yellow, fraying caution tape that extended halfway through a small set of stairs, and it made Yuuki wonder how many people had stopped by to take pictures of it while the house’s owner bragged on the steps, showing off the security footage.

He didn’t say it. Couldn’t say it. Mrs. Amamiya wanted to believe these people finally weren’t thinking of anyone but themselves and he couldn’t take that from her.

“I’m sure he’ll be happy to see it, when he finally comes back,” Yuuki said, “since it would mean that someone cared that he was gone.”

Even if it was only because they were raking in a profit.

Mrs. Amamiya chuckled. “Oh, no, he’ll hate it. He never liked the spotlight, not even during his competitions; we have some videos at home, don’t we, dear?”

Mr. Amamiya hummed. “I think so. He looks like a deer in headlights on the podium, I remember that.”

Then Mrs. Amamiya said, “I wonder if he grew out of it.”

Another hum. “Maybe.”

Yuuki remembered that skittish Akira, the one from the very first memory he had unlocked, the one who had been overwhelmed by a crowd of people and ran away. Yuuki had thought that it was because they were tearing the clothes right off his back—but he might have run anyway, if he hated it so much. It had probably been the first time in months or years that he had seen so many people gathered together, so many people staring at him and calling his new, unfamiliar name and judging him with scowling faces.

Then he thought about how the Amamiyas wouldn’t know whether their own son had grown out of it and felt even worse. How distant had they been, before Ren disappeared? How often had he been left on his own, looking out at the crowd during his competitions and hoping for a pair of familiar faces that were never there? Had he, like Yuuki, gradually learned to stuff his medals into his gym bag to avoid the unwanted attention when he got home?

Probably. Yuuki knew it, somehow, deep in his bones: he and Ren Amamiya hadn’t been all that different; Ren had just gone looking for attention from tourists instead of moping that his parents didn’t give him any. Yuuki, who had been warned off of interacting with strangers for so long that it was an ingrained habit not to, didn’t understand how Ren couldn’t think of himself as brave. It took guts to talk to strangers, but maybe he’d taken heart in the fact that once they left, they would never meet again.

“Here we are,” Mrs. Amamiya called out, and Yuuki came out of his thoughts as the car pulled into the driveway of a small, two-story house in need of a fresh coat of paint. The garden out front was filled with flowering bushes obscuring the windows on the first story, and Mrs. Amamiya explained that it was because people had come around pointing cameras inside. They’d wanted privacy as they worried over the whereabouts of their son and whenever Ms. Akechi visited, and she fingered a fragile white flower Yuuki didn’t know the name of with a look on her face that screamed that she wished it hadn’t been necessary.

Yuuki felt much the same. The Amamiyas shouldn’t have to hide their private grief from the world. It shouldn’t have needed to be done in the first place; if that other dimension had never taken Ren, he would still be here and there wouldn’t be bushes lining the front of the Amamiya house. Mrs. Amamiya wouldn’t have a dozen gray streaks in her hair. Mr. Amamiya’s face wouldn’t sag with frown lines.

Yuuki wouldn’t know what it was like to love.

(He probably wouldn’t be alive.)

The inside was clean, though. He toed off his shoes at the genkan and left his bag there; Mr. Amamiya was out on the walkway, running an eye over the bushes; Mrs. Amamiya was already in the kitchen, telling him to look around while she got dinner ready. It smelled like curry, and while the spice blend would be different from the one Boss used, Yuuki regretted telling her it was his favorite.

He’d eat hamburger steak at this point, as long as it wasn’t curry.

… And he was apprehensive, wandering around a house that wasn’t his. The walls were bare, the decorations minimal. The only photos he found were the ones in the small shrine in the living room, of men and women with smiling faces and gray hair. Ren’s grandparents, if he had to guess. Yuuki sat and offered up prayers for a few minutes, then realized he had never sent that text to Ryuji telling him he’d gotten here safe and sound. **How was Yusuke?** he tacked onto the end, settling onto the couch.

 **An ass** , was the reply after a few more minutes. **You never told me someone saw you n Yamada.** **Dude was acting like it was the end of the world**

For Yusuke, who probably had traditional values shoved down his throat growing up, maybe it had been. Yuuki was supposed to be waiting patiently for Akira—but why did that also mean that he had to act like a sailor’s wife waiting for her husband to come home? Why did that mean Yuuki couldn’t make a few mistakes here and there?

Why did it feel like it meant that Yuuki couldn’t be a bit disturbed by the fact that Yusuke had seen them and hadn’t said anything? What did it mean that Yusuke had run off, instead of confronting them about it?

Was he—was he one of those people, the ones who could talk and put on a front of acceptance but, when it was shoved in their face, couldn’t stand it? Had he expected Yuuki to call the last few months a joke and pull a girlfriend out of thin air?

 _No need to worry_ , Yuuki would say. _See? I’m normal._

Except he wasn’t, and he never would be, and Yusuke had been acting like he didn’t find that a problem. Yusuke had been acting like it was fine, and was laughing behind his back—or, like Yuuki’s mother, scoffing about degeneracy and the waste of human resources gays like Yuuki were.

It hurt more than the slap did. It stung deep in his chest and down in his stomach; obligation had been the only thing keeping Yusuke around, but disgust finally won. That was the reason Yusuke hadn’t been hanging out as often as before. That was the reason he wasn’t answering texts anymore.

He thought Yuuki was disgusting, but didn’t have the nerve to say so.

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Amamiya said, catching him with his head in his hands and trying not to become a sobbing wreck on her couch, in her house, on a visit she insisted he take. Her hands touched his back and he flinched at the feeling of her nails, so different from a brick wall—

(Not so different, not really, not in the end, sharp and tugging and insistent and he hadn’t meant for it to happen, not really, not at all)

—and she snatched them back, making worried noises, asking him if he was alright and if he was going to be sick from the train or car ride and did he need help standing, if he needed the bathroom?

What he needed was to go back in time to the beginning of summer vacation and tell his dad they could go to a different restaurant, or to Leblanc, or anywhere that wasn’t where Yamada had cornered him on the street. What he needed was to unknow what Yusuke really thought about him.

What he needed was Akira, holding him close and telling him it didn’t matter what Yusuke really thought, because Akira would never leave. Akira would always love him.

“Mishima, please,” Mrs. Amamiya said, kneeling down on her own floor, her hands hovering in the air between them. He could feel them there, waiting to strike. “What happened? I want to help, but I can’t if I don’t know.”

He lowered his hands just long enough to catch a glimpse of gray eyes—Akira’s eyes, and filled with just as much worry for him as Akira’s would have—and felt the tears spring up, hot and burning. Her face blurred out of recognition.

If Yuuki weren’t around, Akira wouldn’t be on his way home—that was what he’d been telling himself these past few months, in the dark as he tried to sleep and on the train rides to school and at work at Leblanc when the obnoxious customers got to be too much. But now he couldn’t get the thought out of his head that if he weren’t around, Akira would have a chance at a normal relationship. He could have married a girl, and his parents could be eagerly awaiting a legal marriage on his return, and then they’d get to have grandkids to spoil better than their own son.

Yuuki was taking that away from them. Yuuki, who Kamoshida always said just caused trouble for everyone else on the team by being too slow, too meek, too scared to let the ball hit him. Yuuki was causing trouble for the Amamiyas just by being here in their house, crying on their couch, pulling the missus away from her cooking.

And all it had taken was a stray thought, a passing realization. Yusuke wanted him to be normal, and he couldn’t be. He’d never be. He didn’t want to lie to himself anymore, and that meant learning not to lie to everyone else.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, when it felt like his chest wasn’t about to be crushed by the weight of her stare. He heard Mr. Amamiya finally come in and felt the dull pounding of his stride as he came over.

“What happened?” Mr. Amamiya asked.

“I don’t know,” Mrs. Amamiya said.

“I’m sorry,” Yuuki said again. “I’m taking him from you. I—I know that’s not what you want, but—”

“Mishima,” said Mr. Amamiya, “the only ones who took Ren from us were his kidnappers. You can’t possibly take him from us, too, because he chose you. You’re who he wants to be with. He told us he’d never speak to us again if we couldn’t accept that.”

“And it took such a long time to,” said Mrs. Amamiya. “We thought—we thought what all parents think, I suppose. That he’d find a nice girl he wanted to settle down with, that he would want to get married to, and—well, it was hard at first, letting that go. But it turned out we didn’t know Ren nearly as well as we thought we did.”

“We hardly knew him at all.”

“We definitely didn’t remember him being so forceful, so certain. That boy of ours would take on an army for you, Mishima. We could see that, plain as day.”

Akira had already fought armies, and for people who meant less to him than Yuuki. Akira would fight the whole world if it meant righting some wrong done to anyone, much less to Yuuki.

Mr. Amamiya walked off, leaving Yuuki alone with his wife. His cheek stung with phantom pain; his jaw ached from clenching it.

“Mishima,” Mrs. Amamiya said, “I’m going to put a hand on your back, alright? Is that okay?”

“I don’t understand,” he grit out. “How can you not hate me? I’m taking him from you. If he’d never met me, maybe he’d find a nice girl to date. Maybe I would have, too.”

Her touch this time was tentative and soft; she worked circles into his back, rubbing out the tension in between his shoulder blades. “Then you’d be lying to yourself, wouldn’t you?”

The way Yamada had, in the aftermath of Saturday night—saying that the kiss didn’t mean anything, they weren’t kids playing around anymore, even though Ryuji had been so sure of the longing on his face as they left the station. How nervous he’d been when confronted with the idea that Yuuki didn’t want to just sweep it all under the rug and let it die; how nervous he’d been just seeing the two of them.

If he’d never met Akira, maybe Yuuki would have found someone else. Yamada, maybe, or Fukuoka. At some point down the line he wouldn’t be able to lie anymore.

“There isn’t a person alive who doesn’t make at least one other person uncomfortable at some point in their life,” Mrs. Amamiya went on. “Not everyone is going to be comfortable with who you are are, or who Ren is, or who you both love—but that doesn’t mean you have to apologize for it, Mishima, dear. Never apologize for who you are.”

It seemed so strange, how much she didn’t care—but this was the woman who had offered him one of her son’s shirts, just so Yuuki could have a piece of Akira nearby, something more than a necklace.

“He’ll be happy with you,” she said as her husband came back, “but you have to give that a chance. Anyone who tells you not to isn’t looking for you. Now, I’ve got to go finish dinner.”

She left him with a final pat; Mr. Amamiya set a book down on the coffee table and followed her into the kitchen.

Yuuki stared. The sketchbook sat there, innocent and slightly grimy with gray streaks across the cover. Some of the pages bent at awkward angles, as if it had been shoved out of sight too quickly too many times, as if whatever was inside wasn’t meant for prying eyes.

But, if it was here, that meant it was okay for him to look, right? Just a little?

He flipped it open; the first handful of pages were drawings for class, sketches of students and landscapes and flowers, but after that came scenes: boys walking down a hallway, girls laughing at jokes, sports team practices. Yuuki paused for a long time at a page with a pair of swimmers, their arms slung across each other’s shoulders as they dripped water over the floor, lean muscles delicately shaded.

Underneath it was a note: _I only stopped for a second, but it sticks with me anyway._

Another page: a dancer in a leotard, her hair streaming around her much like the ribbon from the wand in one hand, her back arching with an effortless grace that Yuuki knew had to be from endless practice. Another note: _Yoshizawa’s routine was especially good today. I wish she believed me when I told her that._

Another page: a boy, his hair tousled and his face crinkled with laughter. A girl, the fall of her hair as it escaped her ponytail rendered in quiet swoops of the pencil, her face serious as she read from a book.

More pages. More boys and girls, more classmates in their uniforms or jerseys. The serene expression of a girl as she sang; the determination of a boy as he raced; lines traced with care gradually becoming hurried and harsh. The notes were sporadic, ranging from _Tsukimoto_ _has a nice smile_ to _Hoshino caught me staring and called me a creep_.

There were a lot of those later in the book, as the uniforms changed from sailor suits and gakurans to blazers and blouses. Ren—and it had to be Ren, this book had to be Ren’s—wrote more and drew less, an impatient need to understand guiding his pencils through gossip and hearsay. Sometimes he would sketch the scenes out and sometimes he wouldn’t, and Yuuki came across more than one picture Ren had tried to erase: two boys kissing turned into a paragraph on Tsukimoto’s ill-timed confession to an upperclassman; one girl with her lips pressed into the hollow of another girl’s throat became a tale of how Hoshino was transferring to a school halfway across the country.

 _No wonder she didn’t like me staring_ , Ren wrote. _Hazama isn’t taking it well, either._

_Found Nagashima by the old school building_ _yesterday_ _. He and Shindo had a fight. I thought it was weird, because they get along so well—but when I asked why, Nagashima didn’t say. Shindo went around today telling everyone that Nagashima’s gay; Nagashima didn’t dispute it. Everybody’s disgusted, but I don’t understand why. Boys have their appeal too, don’t they? What’s so wrong with liking them?_

“We had no idea,” Mr. Amamiya said, and Yuuki looked up to see him staring at the book, face carefully blank. “Just—none. About any of it, about how he felt or what he was going through. It was only after he had been missing for a week that we thought to go through his things, just to see where he might have gone. I don’t know why he didn’t take this book with him, but he didn’t. Maybe it wasn’t that important to him, in the end. It might not prove anything that his mother and I have been thinking, and it might not help you believe you aren’t taking him from us, Mishima, but—”

He paused, long enough to make Yuuki squirm in his seat. Mrs. Amamiya waited over by the dining table, plates already full of steaming food.

“You’ll make him happy, and that’s all that matters,” Mr. Amamiya finished. “That’s all we want for our boy—and you, too. Now, why don’t we set all this aside and eat? We can talk more on it later, if you’d like.”

“You really only want him to be happy?” Yuuki asked. “Even if it’s with me?”

Mr. Amamiya only nodded, somber and silent. Yuuki wasn’t entirely convinced—after discovering how Yusuke secretly hated him this entire time, he had a feeling he’d never take anyone at their word ever again—but it was harder to argue. These were the parents who had been told that if they didn’t like Yuuki, or the fact that Ren was going to marry him, they didn’t have to stick around.

But they had. That had to count for something, didn’t it?

Yuuki had to believe in someone’s word, didn’t he, and he knew from experience how easy it was to push whatever bothered him down into a void where it could only hurt him when no one else was around. Who was to say that everyone else hadn’t learned the same thing?

Who was to say that the Amamiyas hadn’t taken a long, hard look at themselves and were trying to change?

Not Yuuki.

He shut the sketchbook. For now, anything else could wait.

* * *

Shinya scowled at the shirt in front of him, the crumpled mess that was supposed to be neatly folded his worst attempt by far. Kaoru chuckled, reaching over for it, and Shinya swatted his hand away.

“I don’t need help!”

Kaoru shrugged. This wasn’t the first time today that Shinya had snapped that at him, and it wouldn’t be the last. “Alright,” he said, going back to the game.

Shinya picked up the shirt, laid it out across the table, and tried again. Two folds at the shoulders, and one in the middle—and just like the last dozen times, it undid itself halfway through, winding up another crumpled heap.

Shinya resisted the urge to throw it across the room. He was trying to be mature, and tossing things whenever something irritated him was the kind of thing only a kid would do—but it was so damn _hard_.

It was just laundry. Why was it so damn difficult? He had math tests easier than this.

“You’ll get it,” Kaoru encouraged, eyes never leaving Shinya’s phone.

“Shut up,” Shinya muttered. It was one fucking shirt. One.

He eyed Kaoru’s neat example, all crisp corners and without a single wrinkle, and wanted to throw that across the room, too. Instead he said, “Show me again.”

“Did you know there’s a god that’s a universe in here?” Kaoru asked, one hand dragging over his example shirt and shaking it loose. “Or—it _is_ the universe. It’s even got a heart.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

Kaoru set the phone down and—to Shinya’s skyrocketing irritation—folded the shirt without looking at it. He read off a series of numbers, mumbling them as his hands worked until the shirt was back on the table, as neat as before. “I don’t know,” Kaoru said. “This is, well—it’s a very strange game.”

“I’ve been fighting robots and fairies and mermaids for months, and you’re just figuring that out?”

Kaoru shrugged again. It was the summer homework, he’d said as he let Shinya in earlier. There was way more of it than he ever had to deal with, and it was tiring. He glanced at the clock and said, “Dad’s late. He said he’d be home by now.”

Shinya went to answer—Kaoru’s dad broke those kinds of promises all the time, it seemed—but was interrupted by a ferocious knocking at the door.

Kaoru checked his own phone and frowned. “It can’t be Dad. He has a key.”

And if he lost it, he would have called or texted. Normal things, unlike trying to hammer the door down with his fist. Kaoru’s dad didn’t seem the type to be so impatient, either.

 _Weirdo_ , Shinya thought, going back to the shirt as Kaoru went to answer the door. He had it in his hands as Kaoru tired the peephole and, seeing nothing, undid the lock and the deadbolt—

And the shirt went flying as the door slammed open, hitting Kaoru in the face and knocking him over. Shinya froze as a guy in a black suit leveled a gun at him, snagged Kaoru by the hair, and then dragged him out the door. It swung shut behind Kaoru’s kicking feet.

For a long time, Shinya didn’t even dare to breathe. Except for the fact that Kaoru wasn’t in the apartment anymore, it felt like it hadn’t happened at all.

But it… had, hadn’t it. Shinya had stared down the barrel of a real, live gun and froze and Kaoru was gone.

Kaoru was _gone_.

“Shit,” Shinya hissed, catching himself as his legs began to knock together. They felt like jelly—the world was spinning—tinny music was playing from somewhere, warping in and out of familiarity. The app on Shinya’s phone was still open, and next to it sat Kaoru’s—

Kaoru’s phone. Kaoru’s phone, which had Kaoru’s dad’s number on it.

Shinya didn’t want to know what the yakuza wanted with Kaoru or his dad, but he wasn’t about to sit around and do nothing—but following was out of the question, wasn’t it? That gun, sleek and unforgiving, barrel a portal into an abyss Shinya wouldn’t be able to escape from—there was no way Shinya could handle one for real, not when he froze like a deer in headlights at the sight of it.

He nabbed both the phones, letting his own fall into his lap as he slumped to the floor. It was warm, and the music was soothing, and the encyclopedia entry Kaoru had been looking at was still there, an entire universe floating on his screen. The numbers felt like a spell; Shinya chanted them as he searched through Kaoru’s contacts for the right number, then held his breath as the phone rang.

And rang—

And rang—

And _rang_ —

And went to voicemail. Shinya hung up and dialed again, and again, and again.

“Pick _up_ ,” he seethed. “Pick up, pick up, pick up—”

“Yes,” answered someone at last. Not Kaoru’s dad, but still vaguely familiar—the receptionist, probably, irritated voice kept low. “Who is this?”

“Kaoru’s been kidnapped by the yakuza,” he said, ignoring that the receptionist had picked up Kaoru’s dad’s phone. Shinya didn’t care much for the hows or whys of it; maybe he, like Kaoru, had simply left it sitting around.

“Excuse me?”

“Kaoru’s been kidnapped by the yakuza!”

“Kaoru… Iwai? _That_ Kaoru?”

“Who else?!”

He didn’t hear anything else for a while, just a lot of shuffling noises, what sounded vaguely to be a question like _you don’t have your son as a contact in your own phone?_

Some gruff rumble answered it. Shinya would have bet money it was something along the lines of _none of your business_ or _it’s to protect him_.

Fat lot of fucking good that had done, huh?

Shinya’s legs were still shaking. He should—he should get up, lock the door while the receptionist and Kaoru’s dad had their muffled argument about yakuza involvement and Kaoru and something about guns.

Shinya shivered. The barrel had been so far away—but he knew damn well how devastating a gun could be at any range. He’d been one finger twitch away from having his brains blown out.

“Fuck,” he said at the jolt of fear. He couldn’t stop shaking. He needed—he needed to lock the door, protect himself. Anyone could come in, now. Another yakuza goon, or a burglar, or—or—

“It’s Shinya, isn’t it?” asked the receptionist at long last. “Kaoru’s friend?”

“Yeah,” he said, cursing the way his voice shook. He was in middle school; he wasn’t a baby anymore. What the hell did he have to be scared of?

“Where are you?”

“Kaoru’s place,” Shinya said. “He was teaching me to fold laundry.”

“Yes, he’s very good at that, isn’t he? Are you hurt? Did anything happen to you?”

“No, you—go help Kaoru,” he said. “I’m not hurt. I just—I—”

Couldn’t move. Couldn’t seem to stop shaking despite the danger being over. Couldn’t do anything more than sit here and wait for the adults to bring Kaoru back.

So fucking helpless. So fucking weak.

Such a fucking loser.

“You’re scared,” said the receptionist, calm as a still lake, “which is understandable. The yakuza are terrifying, aren’t they?”

“Yeah. He had a gun.”

He heard her relay that particular piece of information and get a gruff curse in reply, which meant they were together, going to rescue Kaoru—

“You can’t,” Shinya said. “You’ll get hurt.”

The receptionist laughed a bit at that, a dry one that said it didn’t matter how much she got hurt. “We’re more worried about Kaoru right now. Don’t worry about us—lock the door and hide somewhere until it’s safe, okay?”

That was easy for her to say. His legs were shaking so hard they were cramping, but even as he hugged himself he was saying, “Please, please help Kaoru.”

“We will, Shinya.”

“He’s the only friend I’ve got.”

“Yes, we know.”

“I—I’m gonna lock the door, now. And hide. And—and you’ll call once you’ve got him, and once he’s back home?”

Her voice softened. Maybe she could hear the tears he was trying not to cry. “Of course. I’m hanging up now, okay?”

It was not okay. It was not okay at all, but if it came down to a firefight Kaoru’s dad and the receptionist would need their hands free. He didn’t want her to hang up, but—

But he had to be brave. Act like a king, like a winner, like everything was already decided and set in stone and all he had to do was sit back and watch it unfold.

“Okay,” he said, and listened as the line went dead. Kept listening as he crawled over to the door, where Kaoru’s shoes were knocked over, and pulled himself up to lock it and slide the deadbolt into place. Kept listening as he crawled back to the table and hugged his knees and felt weak.

Useless. Defenseless.

Just like a kid—just like _the_ kid he was, only in seventh grade and master of a stupid video game which hadn’t prepared him at all for the reality of staring down a gun barrel and knowing that he could die—

He could _die_ —

Fuck, he could have died. Hell, anybody in his place could have died—Kaoru, or his dad, or the receptionist—not just Shinya. That was the power of a gun.

Why, exactly, had he liked them? Had he been attracted to that power, to the ease with which he could stomp out his enemies? How, with just a twitch of a finger, they wouldn’t be his enemies anymore, just corpses on the ground?

Or had he just thought they were cool? All the heroes in the movies his mom didn’t like him watching used guns, and they were cool—

A clatter out on the stairwell jerked Shinya from his thoughts. It could be the yakuza coming back to finish the job—Shinya wasn’t supposed to be alive, everyone knew the yakuza didn’t like witnesses—and he sat there in terror, hearing every footfall go past. A mother’s exasperated call; a child’s high whine.

Shinya grabbed up the phones and crawled his way to Kaoru’s room. With the door shut behind him and Kaoru’s desk chair shoved under the knob for good measure, he tugged the covers off Kaoru’s bed and knelt in a corner.

He knew they didn’t make him invulnerable. If anyone did decide to break in, Shinya wouldn’t stand a chance; he just liked the—and it sounded kiddish, even as he tugged them over his head and covered his face—the feel of them against him, as if nothing could go wrong, as if he was protected.

He wasn’t, and it was a stupid thought and a dumb instinct. By all rights he should have outgrown it years ago; but that was before Shinya had stared down the barrel of a gun and watched as his one and only friend was dragged out the door by a guy in a suit, his sunglasses like holes in his face. Like he wasn’t human anymore.

Shinya liked that thought more than the one where the guy blew his brains out.

… Shinya liked any thought more than the one where the guy blew his brains out, or Kaoru’s, or Kaoru’s dad’s, or the receptionist’s.

He should have called the police, but it was a well-known secret that the police would have thrown their hands in the air, claimed they could do nothing, and then probably would have taken Shinya in for disturbing the peace or obstructing justice or some other bullshit. The police were nothing more than bribed bullies and everyone knew it.

He was going to go crazy just sitting around and waiting like this. The app on his phone was still running, screen still displaying that universe that was actually a god or some weird scifi bullshit like that, but after watching Prim fire a laser at the robot guy with nothing more than a song and her willpower, Shinya would believe anything.

And he had to believe that Kaoru was coming back. How else was Shinya going to learn what was going on in this weird, messed up game? Who else was going to sit back with his phone and read the boring plot dialogue and the encyclopedia, and still manage to teach him how to fold a shirt at the same time?

“He better come back,” Shinya said to the screen. There was no way Prim could hear him, but just this once he thought it would be nice if she could, and no one was around to judge, either. He left the menu and moved her out to a field where he knew the enemies came in massive waves.

He needed a distraction, and anything was better than sitting in the dark, quiet room and flinching at every noise he heard. “He better come back, Prim. He better be okay, or—”

Or—

Well, he didn’t know what. There was no way Shinya could storm a yakuza stronghold for revenge, and there was no way the police would do it, so if anything happened Shinya was just going to have to live with it.

He didn’t want to lose his only fucking friend to a shitty yakuza feud. He didn’t want to lose Kaoru to something dumb his dad did years ago that the adults were still whining about. What the fuck had Kaoru ever done to them, anyway? What the fuck had Shinya done, except be in the apartment for some asshole in a suit to aim at?

What the fuck had either of them done, except know the wrong people?

He lost track of time running Prim around in circles. He lost track of how much EXP he was racking up, and how many items were going to waste because his inventory was full already, and how many waves of enemies he took down. Prim was strong enough that she could obliterate anything and everything except the boss waves, leaving Shinya to rely on her magic to take them out. It was instantaneous, the rising tide of her power nigh-unstoppable.

She was unstoppable. Shinya was unstoppable.

They were both unstoppable, together.

* * *

By the time Shinya calmed down enough to leave Prim standing around in the field while he used the bathroom, the sun had set. Shadows crawled across the floor of the living room; Shinya ran into the wall on more than one occasion, determined not to turn the lights on in case the yakuza were watching the apartment. If they thought anyone was home, if they thought Shinya was going to try and leave to get help, who knew what they would do?

In Kaoru’s apartment, hugging the wall so he didn’t trip over chairs or run into the table because he was too damn scared to turn the fucking lights on, Shinya felt just as worthless as he had when Kaoru suggested they cook together, completely unaware that Shinya had no idea how to make anything other than toast and instant noodles: small, looked down on, as helpless as a newborn baby. He kept turning it over in his head, how he wasn’t strong enough to protect himself or Kaoru, how he’d never win if any of the altercations with his classmates—bullies, Shinya knew, but his mom wouldn’t like that idea very much, would she—came to blows. How Shinya would lose, badly, if he ever had to try to prove himself with his fists, his own might.

He didn’t have any. But a gun, though—a gun was strong enough on its own. It didn’t matter how strong or weak the wielder was as long as he could aim and fire.

Shinya was halfway across the living room, trying not to disturb the curtains too much, when there was noise at the door. A key turning in the lock, then the door catching on the deadbolt. A gruff curse that had to be Kaoru’s dad.

“Kid,” he called. “Let us in.”

Kaoru, behind him somewhere, started to say something, but the door shut before Shinya could hear more than “Dad—”

Shinya ran for the door, tripping over a chair and banging his ribs into the table on his way. There could be another yakuza behind them both, gun aimed at their backs and determined to get inside the apartment, but that didn’t matter because for right now Kaoru was okay, Kaoru was alright, Kaoru was on the other side of the door, waiting to be let in.

Shinya didn’t have to be told twice. He slid the deadbolt free and threw the door open, Kaoru’s dad in his camo coat sweating in the summer heat pushing past him as soon as the door opened, tugging Kaoru along behind him. Kaoru, looking none the worse for wear except for the dirty, ragged socks on his feet, smiling lightly despite the grip on his wrist.

Kaoru’s dad didn’t even pause at the genkan to toe his shoes off; he marched over to the table and collapsed into a chair, Kaoru standing by.

Shinya shut the door and slid the deadbolt home.

“Don’t you have someplace to be, kid?” his dad asked, fingers digging into his temple.

“Probably,” Shinya answered. His mom must be worried sick by now. She must be calling him, frantic, praying that he was alright and that there was someone to blame, but he’d been too busy playing the game on his phone to bother checking for missed calls or texts.

Kaoru’s dad sighed; his shoulders sagged. He buried more of his face in his hand. “You should go home.”

He should, shouldn’t he? But that would mean dealing with his mom, and he didn’t feel like it. She’d try to blame Kaoru and his dad for Shinya missing dinner and her calls. She’d try to tell Shinya that Kaoru wasn’t good enough for him, that they shouldn’t hang out anymore, that they shouldn’t be friends.

Bullshit.

Kaoru was the best damn thing to happen to him since Gun About. Kaoru didn’t judge him, didn’t try to make excuses for him, didn’t try to poke and prod at him as if waiting for something interesting to happen. Kaoru didn’t care that Shinya’s hair was long, or that he liked to curse, or that he didn’t know how to fold a shirt or cook.

“I’m not leaving,” Shinya said.

Kaoru’s dad sighed again. Kaoru said, “I told you he wouldn’t want to.”

“I’m not leaving,” Shinya said again, because Kaoru’s dad was shaking his head and acting like Shinya didn’t have the damn right to stay, after spending all afternoon in this fucking dark apartment worrying over whether anyone was going to come back, or whether someone was going to be calling and saying they were all in the hospital or dead.

Kaoru chuckled. Shinya didn’t understand how he could, after being kidnapped by the yakuza. Hadn’t the bastard in the suit held a gun to his head? Didn’t he care that he could have died, leaving Shinya all alone again?

“Don’t laugh,” Shinya said, and didn’t make excuses to himself for how sharp it came out. “Do you—do you have any idea how worried I was, you—you _asshole_ —do you have any idea—”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said, though he was still smiling, completely unapologetic.

It was the smile that made Shinya launch himself at him, fists clenched and pounding anywhere he could reach. The hits had no strength to them—Kaoru barely moved, at all—which just made Shinya angrier, because if he wasn’t strong enough to beat up one asshole, how could he beat up another?

“Damn you,” Shinya said, in between hits. “Damn you—fuck you—I thought you might have _died_ , and then you come back acting like nothing happened—”

“Sorry,” Kaoru said.

“Not accepted!”

“Really, I am.”

“Not! Accepted! You asshole!”

At some point Kaoru’s dad must have found this funny; he started laughing, a silent shake of the shoulders that worked its way up out of his mouth in deep chortles. Kaoru looked at Shinya and his dad like they were two of the most precious people on the planet as Shinya gave up hitting, threw his arms around Kaoru’s middle, and squeezed for all he was worth.

It wasn’t much, but Shinya got the feeling Kaoru wasn’t going to understand just how important he was unless Shinya made it hurt. If the ache in his ribs stayed long enough, maybe then he would realize that he meant something to someone, and that coming home starry-eyed after being kidnapped by the yakuza—and having next to no remorse for Shinya, left here alone for so fucking long—wasn’t the proper response.

It wasn’t. It wasn’t.

Shinya was going to make sure Kaoru saw that.


	16. Summer Vacation, The Second Tuesday, Morning

“And you’re sure you’re alright?” Nakanohara asked, eyes narrowed behind his glasses, scrutinizing. Searching for that one thing that would make him decide he would have to stay home from work, as he had wanted to do yesterday.

“I’m—well, I’m not fine,” Yusuke admitted. Something about that meal with Ryuji—after Ryuji—had not sat well with his stomach. He’d eaten too much, and he knew it. “I—I only want some quiet, Nakanohara. To think. You understand, I’m sure.”

“Not particularly, no,” he said, but leaned back at last, one hand reaching for his briefcase. “When Kayo left me, I would play movies and music at all hours. The noise kept me from thinking of her too much. But—this must be Madarame’s doing. He always did like silence in that shack of his, didn’t he? Too much noise meant we weren’t working; I can understand that you must be used to it, Yusuke.”

“I am.”

Nakanohara sighed. “Well, alright, then. You’ll let me know if I need to come back, won’t you? For any reason.”

“I will,” Yusuke promised, knowing he wouldn’t. If he couldn’t deal with a bit of heartbreak and the loss of his only few friendships at the same time—and on his own, like any other adult in the world—could he call himself a man? Could he call himself an adult?

There were things that needed to be done, and Yusuke couldn’t wallow forever, as much as he wanted to. He had to let this wash over him like water over a duck’s feathers and learn to live without what he had grown used to over this scant year.

(Had it really only been a year?)

“Good,” Nakanohara said, and nodded for good measure, and then left.

Yusuke sagged against the wall after a minute or two of waiting for him to come back through the door, saying he had changed his mind and that he wasn’t leaving until he was sure Yusuke could function like a normal human being.

(Sometimes Yusuke wondered what ‘normal’ meant. It couldn’t be the ability to continue living despite being shaken to the core, but sometimes he wondered; he knew his old classmates would never consider him ‘normal’ no matter what he did now to try to rectify that. They weren’t around anymore to witness it, and if they were, they never said a word.)

But eventually he locked the door, trudged back over to the kitchen for a glass of water, and went back to his room.

The bed was so inviting.

He snatched up his phone and sat in front of the easel, feeling the ridges of dried paint on the floor with his toes as the app started up. Akira stared at him from the canvas, all blankness and lines; then Akira stared at him from the phone screen, eyes a bit duller than yesterday. Even his curls sagged with exhaustion.

He muttered something that might have been _so soon?_ and probably was, and while it would have been a simple matter to switch to the other channel and find something else to do—Yusuke couldn’t do it. Akira looked as if he could take every bit of downtime he could get.

Yusuke, too, wasn’t in the mood to deal with the nonsensical at the moment. This other planet was proving to be just as distressingly incomprehensible as life on the Soreil—Yusuke still didn’t quite understand where the planetoid had sprung from, where the dirt and grass had come from, and where it disappeared to when it did disappear—and there were enemies to fight there, and new allies to remember the names of, and new temptations to resist. Everyone on Yuuki’s forum had gone through an uproar when the pretty android girl asked Delta to live there with her; the ones that had jokingly said yes were promptly booted from the app and could no longer access it, to their annoyance and Yusuke’s growing concern. It was becoming clear that he and a select few would be the ones to hold Akira’s fate in their hands.

And Akira was in no shape to fight at the moment. Wherever they went they were bombarded with enemies, even on that other planet. Delta and Casty had barely been strong enough to fight them off; there was no way Akira could, with his weak spells and tired frame.

So instead of doing that, Yusuke guided them back over to the Dive Shop. Akira only gave the briefest of troubled looks at the machines as the robot forked over the requested fee, then steeled himself and stepped inside.

Yusuke didn’t understand the mechanics behind it; a machine that could peer into one’s soul was just as ludicrous as the magic that was made there—but this was a different world, a different dimension. Viruses had feelings and personalities; artificial lifeforms had slowly but surely begun a takeover of the ship; ice cream piled on a motherboard powered up the robot’s attacks. Ren had sent a pair of his friends to a distant planet through nothing but the power of his thoughts and the energy of a microquasar.

Yusuke didn’t try to understand anything here anymore, so he didn’t try to understand how Morgana could have his own place on Akira’s Genomap. He and Akira hadn’t Chained together the way Akira and Renaflask had—but maybe that was another of the virus’ traits, this automatic bonding.

Or not, judging by the shock on Morgana’s face.

 _“_ _Hello, Morgana,”_ the mental-Akira said.

 _“_ _I—uh—”_ Morgana sputtered, and Yusuke offered his own greeting. _“_ _Oh, hush! I’m—I’m trying to understand how, after that_ _super-_ _cool goodbye I gave last time, I find myself staring at the very place the Lighthouse Keeper said he never wanted to come back to!”_

Akira turned and looked over the hill: the familiar fields of rotary phones, Morgana’s shop, and his house in a state of repair that Yusuke hadn’t seen, ever. There had always been that batch of missing graphics somewhere, hanging next to a door or on the ceiling until the whole place had disappeared behind dizzying lines of code.

 _“_ _Isn’t it obvious?”_ the mental-Akira said. _“It’s just how important to me you are.”_

Morgana groaned. He hung his head for approximately three seconds before sighing. _“Well, fine. I guess I’m just surprised after how badly you wanted to leave that it’s… here, at all, in any shape or form. I wonder if my shop still has that line of items stocked…”_

 _“_ _Who knows,”_ the mental-Akira said.

_“_ _Wait a minute! That’s right; you said you’d try my new machine next time! Well, it’s next time—let’s get going!”_

_“_ _Ah—hey, Morgana, you don’t need to pull me—”_

What had he gotten himself into? They hadn’t even properly Dived into this world, and Morgana was already exerting his influence—but perhaps it was different because he was a virus, perhaps there was no world within his soul to Dive into—and Akira was allowing himself to be dragged along by the hand rather easily. He was letting Morgana talk him into trying out the vending machine once, twice, three times—four, five, six times—each one costing more than the last, until the machine ran out.

The mental-Akira held up a sandal and asked how it had cost him three times as much as a giant Moai head, to which Morgan shrugged. _“I don’t know what you would have gotten. It’s random, remember?”_

_“_ _That—that doesn’t mean—”_

**It’s fine** , Yuske said, breaking up the argument before it could take off.

 _“_ _Oh, that’s right, too!”_ Morgana exclaimed, and Yusuke realized that the child-like physique wasn’t all for show. Morgana sulked and perked up almost as much as Yusuke had, back when he was six or seven. Had Yuuki discovered how childish Morgana actually was, or had Morgana managed to hide it for that long? _“Mr. Robot over here never got a tour last time! Talk about a shame; here, let me show you around.”_

 _“_ _Hey!”_ the mental-Akira yelled, from his spot by the capsule machine. _“Morgana, wait!”_

It was a bit late for waiting; Morgana already had the robot by the arm, what could only be a devious smile curling his lips.

 _“_ _So, this is obviously my store,”_ Morgana began, gesturing back to the shop with its dozen capsule machines out front and the mental-Akira tossing down the sandal he’d been holding to catch up. _“I carry everything here! Or, uh, mostly everything—but I’m sure you knew that much.”_

**I did.**

_“_ _Huh, you remember! So, see, over here are the Kemokemo Plains. My choice of name, naturally, but since the Lighthouse Keeper never used it, I guess that plan was a bust.”_

**Plan?**

_“_ _Oh, sure,”_ Morgana purred. _“See, the idea was that he’d sound cute when he said it. And for a while I got him to say it, and he’d blush the whole time! It was perfect! And then he stopped, because apparently he couldn’t stand me teasing him about it, and you know what they say about spoilsports like him!”_

Yusuke knew very well what they said about spoilsports. He’d been called one himself for a long time until he learned to keep quiet, but by then it was too late: he’d lost any tentative friendships between him and his classmates, and all because he didn’t want to follow their lead.

No one liked a spoilsport.

 _“_ _Morgana,”_ the mental-Akira said as he finally caught up, _“what in the world are you telling him?”_

_“_ _Just that you don’t like my naming scheme.”_

_“_ _Of course I don’t like it,”_ the mental-Akira sighed. _“No grown man would want to be called cute over saying something like ‘Kemokemo Plains.’”_

This started another argument that Yusuke ignored as Morgana continued to tug him wherever he pleased, the mental-Akira trailing in their footsteps.

A plan. Morgana had had a plan—not to make Akira seem like less of spoilsport, but to make him seem more likable, more relatable, more human—to make whoever the monitor connected to want to stay? To make them want to help him?

But, why?

 _“_ _And look, Keeper, your house is all fixed up,”_ Morgana preened, grinning with a mouth full of sharp teeth. _“After all the work I put in to build it, you had to go and destroy it—but it’s okay here! We can sit for a bit, have some tea—”_

 _“_ _I never destroyed my house!”_ came the argument.

 _“_ _Whether you were aware of it or not, the moment you decided you wanted to leave, you began to destroy it,”_ Morgana said. _“The house was part of the plan, Keeper! If you wanted to stay, it would have held up just fine! But you didn’t, so it didn’t, either.”_

The mental-Akira huffed at that, but was too deep in thought to notice as Morgana tugged the robot up to the next floor. Yusuke couldn’t recall a second floor in Akira’s house—he had never seen stairs there, and had assumed the one story was all there was.

But Yusuke doubted it was a second floor at all when he saw it: doors, nearly a dozen of them, and in as many styles. Japanese folding screens with the seasons bright on the panels; a robotic door out of a science fiction movie; something plain and wooden and unassuming. Morgana’s grin was still wide here, even as his tail twitched with irritation.

 _“_ _But this,”_ he said, _“was not something I came up with. Unlocking your memories wasn’t what I was tasked with, and it directly interfered with my duty to keep you here. The more you remembered, the more you’d want to leave. I tried to control it as best as I could, but we can see how that turned out.”_

 _“_ _Morgana,”_ the mental-Akira said, refusing to look up from the floor. _“That can’t be what you mean.”_

_“_ _You’re right! This wasn’t your fault, Keeper, it was the fault of that helper of yours. He was the one—”_

_“_ _Don’t,”_ the mental-Akira warned.

_“Why not? Unless you mean you don’t want this one to get jealous, right?”_

_“_ _That’s got nothing to do with this!”_

**You mean Yuuki.**

_“_ _See?”_ Morgana managed to grin even wider. It had to hurt, but he kept it up, even as his cheeks shook with effort. _“And Mr. Robot’s not even jealous! I know you can tell, Keeper.”_

The mental-Akira said nothing to that, fixated on the floorboards, hands pressed to his heart.

“You can’t still be angry,” Yusuke muttered aloud, taking in Akira’s pained expression, as if he’d taken a knife to the chest.

 _“_ _Yup, it was just me, you, and that helper of yours,”_ Morgana said. _“Memory unlocking aside, he was useful enough on his own; he gathered so many Sharl, and all because I asked him to! The best part is that the only thing he wanted in return was—”_

 _“_ _Don’t,”_ the mental-Akira warned again.

Morgana only kept grinning in response. Yusuke could guess a few things to end that sentence, however: love; friendship; attention; time to spend with Akira.

All things Yusuke wanted from Yuuki. All things that he couldn’t bear to have anymore, the memory of Saturday night still stinging in his mind like a burn, because while Yusuke hated that Yuuki couldn’t be faithful to Akira, it still hurt that he hadn’t chosen _Yusuke_ to dalliance with.

Instead, he had chosen Yamada.

 _“_ _Yuuki was important to me,”_ the mental-Akira said at last, _“but he isn’t here now. You are.”_

“Even though I don’t want to be?” Yusuke asked himself.

_“_ _It was lonely before, but now I’m awake and I can work on making everything right again. Isn’t that all that matters?”_

_“_ _And here I was, trying to get you to remember quieter times,”_ Morgana said, grin finally falling. _“You know, when you didn’t have dozens of enemies breathing down your neck? Or when you weren’t about to collapse from exhaustion? When was the last time you got a decent night’s sleep, huh? And food! When was the last time you ate something that wasn’t questionable?!”_

_“The Chicken & Egg! Bowl isn’t questionable, it’s delicious!”_

_“That doesn’t mean you can eat it three times a day! You need veggies! And fruit!”_

_“_ _I’d eat them if I could find them, you know!”_

_“_ _You’d find them here,”_ Morgana all but screeched, tail lashing, _“where you can also sleep in a real bed!”_

The mental-Akira jumped at that. Akira made it no secret how much he disliked the sleep pods the rest of the ship used to get their sleep; he missed pillows and blankets and the warmth of drifting off all on his own instead of watching the hatch come down—and then watching as it rose again, with a blank nothingness in between.

Yusuke tried to imagine what it would be like, for sleep to become a mere blink of an eye, and couldn’t.

 _“_ _I can’t do that,”_ the mental-Akira insisted. _“You want me to stay for a day, don’t you? But I can’t—it’s too easy to lose track of time here. It’s too peaceful. I’d forget what I came here for, the days would blend together again… I might not be living a quiet, peaceful life, now, but at least I know it’s real.”_

**I want to.**

Morgana and the mental-Akira both stared at the robot; Yusuke, behind the screen, stared back. One or both of them muttered a soft, _“Huh?”_

**I want to.**

Peace and quiet. An hour or two—or a day or three—surely wouldn’t be too much to ask for, would it? He would have time to do whatever he wished however he wished, whether that was staring at his canvases or drowning himself in his blankets.

Who cared if Morgana had all but admitted to manipulating Yuuki? Who cared if Akira was either embarrassed or angry or simply hiding his relationship for the most amount of gain?

Yusuke didn’t.

 **I want to** , he chose again when the prompt came back up at their silence.

Morgana, the conniving snake of a cat that he was, recovered first. He gave a slight purr of a laugh and said, _“Never thought I’d hear that from you, Mr. Robot! Well, why not?”_

_“_ _Wait, wait a minute—”_

But it was too late; Morgana snapped his fingers and called, _“Roll the tape!”_

The screen erupted into the Diving screen Yusuke was used to seeing. What was new was the glitch in the corner, a scattering of extra text where there hadn’t been any before.

**Earthes & Iiona ** **Diving** **= > Morgana**

**Kemokemo Plains**

**Now Loading…**

It was an odd way of spelling Akira’s Ra Cielan name. It was enough to make him wonder if his app was broken, if the connection had a bug in it—it hadn’t been mentioned on Yuuki’s forum, which meant it hadn’t happened to anyone else, which meant it was only Yusuke it was happening to. Everything had been the same until the end of the last Dive, when Yusuke had mentioned knowing of Ren and Goro.

He wondered if anyone else had had the same prompt. Likely not, if the glitch was unique to him and him alone. Would anything else change because of that glitch?

Would Akira change, or would he be the same as ever?

And would this Dive be a true representation of what life had been like for him, for all those years, or would Yusuke be as limited in his decisions as always?

He would, as it turned out. Nearly as soon as the screen cleared, the mental-Akira was gone, his voice coming from a terminal Yusuke couldn’t see. He spouted nonsense of being an average salaryman, fiddled around with the controls for a while, then ran off to catch his train, and nothing Yusuke chose to say seemed to get through to him.

Was that what his life had been like before Yuuki had come along? Voiceless commands from a screen, there and gone before he could be noticed?

It was terribly depressing. Yusuke set out to do his bidding anyway, wondered why all the foodstuffs were in capsule machines, and then returned to the house to cook. The terminal pinged as the mental-Akira returned, Morgana came by to give out a card, and the oven went off at nearly the same time.

Whatever this was, it was not relaxing. Yusuke didn’t even have the chance to pretend to eat before the mental-Akira insisted on using the card.

Yusuke huffed. He should have known he wouldn’t truly gain any peace by doing this, and waited as the card processed and the screen changed into a classroom, the desks sitting empty and the chalkboard bare. The mental-Akira’s voice floated by.

 _“_ _School, huh,”_ he said. _“I haven’t been to one in forever. I almost forgot what it looked like. Isn’t that sad?”_

It wasn’t, but the app offered no prompt to say so.

_“_ _You know, I was on the gymnastics team. There were hardly any boys on it; it was just me and some other guy. He told me he liked dancing but didn’t want to be teased for it, so he joined the gymnastics team instead, because guys who can do flips are apparently more manly than guys who can’t. I can’t remember if I told him anything back. I probably didn’t. After that, I thought I could talk to him about anything, but it turned out I was wrong.”_

**About what?**

But the mental-Akira didn’t say. Yusuke got the feeling he was gazing out the window to the courtyard, where couples and groups sat on blankets and picnicked under the sun.

 _“_ _Looks like fun,”_ he mused. _“When you eat by yourself, it’s kind of pathetic to do something like that.”_

Was this part of the Dive? The mental-Akira, who had been so defensive before… Was this the role he was meant to be playing?

(It was awfully close to the truth, if it was.)

Or… was this, somehow or another, still Akira’s mental world, despite it existing as Morgana’s? Was that how the cat-boy kept him trapped here for so long?

Yusuke couldn’t be sure, not with the roles reversed like this but still the same in the end.

The mental-Akira left after a while. Yusuke assumed that, if he waited long enough, the terminal would ping again—but he had nothing to fill the time with except that singular recipe, so he made bread roll after bread roll, returning to the house with a growing sense that something had gone wrong every time.

The mental-Akira did not come back, after days and days of baking—or so Yusuke assumed, because time in the Dive was skewed at best and nonexistent at worst, and he went searching for answers. Morgana had none except to give him a pitying look and an extra go at the capsule machine; Yusuke could find no hint of him anywhere else outside of the house, which meant he might find his answers inside of it.

A distinct thump from the attic resounded as he returned.

They hadn’t gone there during the short and ill-fated tour, just to the plains and up to the second story, the place that Morgana hadn’t even known existed until just then. But the sound was farther than the second story, and with a single thought and a press of his finger, Yusuke entered the attic, colored in deep blues and greens like the bottom of the sea—and there was a Sharl there, tossing a small rock around. It thumped whenever it hit the floor, and she giggled at the sound.

If it even was a she. The Sharl had no definable gender, but it sounded like a girl’s voice as she turned to throw her rock again and found him waiting. _“Oh, hello. What brings you here?”_

He didn’t want to know what this place was. He only wanted to know—

**Where is Iiona?**

(So the glitch was affecting the prompts, too, then.)

 _“_ _If he_ _left_ _and hasn’t come back, then that means he’s gone,”_ the Sharl said, letting the rock slip out of her arms. _“They have their own lives. Sometimes they think this place is boring, and they don’t come back. That’s all. There will be others.”_

Then she smiled. _“But that’s not quite how it works_ here _! If he hasn’t come back, you can probably see why downstairs, in the Diving Room. You’ve seen it, right? The place with all the doors? He could be stuck there. Morgana’s a big meanie like that.”_

So the mental-Akira hadn’t disappeared, then. Could he be accessing the terminal through a different area of the world?

He had to be, though that was only speculation.

The Sharl waved and giggled some more when he left, hands reaching for her rock again.

Though, once he was there, Yusuke had no idea where to start looking. Any of the doors could lead to the memory the mental-Akira was trapped in—so he checked each one, Ra Cielan scenery taking shape as he searched, the stacked apartments and the Imperial Palace and what looked to be a city floating in the sky, the hum of machinery vibrating in the air.

But no sight of the mental-Akira.

By the time he faced the last door, Yusuke was ready to give up for the day and return to staring at his canvas, where Akira’s sketched form could taunt him with its imperfection. But it was the last door, made of the plainest, unvarnished wood, and Yusuke was nothing if not thorough—and as soon as he stepped inside, he could feel the mental-Akira’s presence.

He wasn’t in sight, but the fresh rubble blocking the robot’s path still smoked with the residue of a spell, and timber splintered and cracked and nearly fell on the robot’s head as he searched. What buildings were left standing were decidedly not Ra Cielan architecture, sky-rises and skyscrapers and simple one- and two-story houses lined the backdrop of destruction. The rubble was so tall in spots that there was no way for him to climb over it, and he wandered down the street, waiting for a spot the destruction hadn’t touched.

 _“_ _It’s pretty sad, huh?”_ Morgana said, popping up from behind a rubble pile. _“While you were busy waiting for him, he was off destroying his own memory.”_

**You knew.**

_“_ _How could I not?”_ he said with a shrug. _“This is my world, and now that I know this area exists, I can keep tabs on it.”_

**And you let him?**

_“_ _If it’s causing him pain, sometimes this is what’s needed.”_ He fingered a piece of rubble, sent it tumbling down a pile, and sighed. _“Although it does make me wonder—what was so distressing about this memory that he had to go and destroy it?”_

Because it was Earth, Yusuke wanted to say but couldn’t. It was Earth, and Akira’s loneliness, and his arrest and his parents forcing him out of his own house. It was being unwanted and having no place to go because no one could trust him. It was trying to do the right thing and failing so miserably that he had become the villain.

They found a poster at the end of the warpath, Ren’s unflattering mugshot scratched to near unrecognition, the details of his disappearance struck through in spots. The corners were torn, as if the mental-Akira had tried to tear it off the wall and failed. There was blood in small splatters all across the paper—and all down the rest of the way, there were more posters, more mugshots staring back at them, wide-eyed and scared.

It became obvious, then, that Akira was trying to throw Ren away. That the weak, unwanted child he’d been was not who he was anymore—but surely that didn’t call for such destruction.

Was he angry? At the weak, lonely child he used to be; at the fantastically corrupt system that had wronged him; at his own parents, who hadn’t seemed to care one iota for his well-being—that would be an anger that could destroy.

Or perhaps it was simpler than that: Akira was merely trying to destroy the memory itself, of Earth as he knew it without Yuuki. Perhaps all he wanted was a clean slate through which to view the planet and people he wanted to return to so badly.

It was so hard to say with any certainty.

**Where is he?**

_“_ _Where do you think?”_ Morgana fixed him with a bright blue stare.

**You let this happen.**

_“_ _Do you really think I can stop him the way I am? He’ll bowl me over and barely give a second’s thought—besides, I thought I told you: this world, this whole world, despite being mine, was made for_ him _. I was made for him, too. The only thing I can do anymore is help him when he needs it.”_

**What a strange virus.**

Morgana grinned, and gave a short cat’s laugh. _“I did everything I could to encourage people to come, to visit him. I gave out date cards and kept the machines stocked with whatever he needed to make whatever came to mind. I was the one who told him a little flirting never hurt anybody—but he hasn’t tried that with you, has he? Maybe he can tell it won’t work. Maybe that upset him.”_

Yusuke didn’t think so. Akira? Want to flirt with him? Just the idea made his stomach burn.

Yusuke was… oddly tired of love.

He was also tired of Morgana. If Akira had been told that flirting would keep his visitors around, Yusuke couldn’t help but wonder if the relationship Akira and Yuuki had built up was based on a lie.

Yusuke knew how easy it was to fake tears, after all. Madarame had been a master of the art.

Morgana waved goodbye and vaulted over a nearby wall; Yusuke turned and went back the way he came and down to the first story, where the pile of bread rolls sat untouched on the counter.

There were only a handful of places he hadn’t checked yet, and one of them was unlikely to be Akira’s hiding spot; he headed out for the World Cliff, where Akira had chosen, after a long and grueling battle against Morgana, to wake up from his long dream. To save the ungrateful people of Ra Ciela.

To return to Earth and to Yuuki.

The mental-Akira sat by the cliff’s edge, one leg dangling over the side. _“You found me,”_ he said.

**What happened?**

_“_ _This is probably a little late, but—when you’re done here, I don’t want you to go any deeper. I can’t stand the things you make me remember.”_

**And Ren?**

_“_ _Don’t,”_ he said. Yusuke expected anger; he heard only exhaustion. _“Ren’s not who I need to be to survive here. The place he used to live—the people he used to know—they’re not who and what I need to survive here, either. I need to be Ion. That’s who I am; that’s why_ _that memory_ _had to be destroyed.”_

He snorted with derision. _“Although, I didn’t do a very good job, did I?”_

**You can’t run from it.**

_“_ _I know that,”_ he snapped. _“But I can keep it at bay, can’t I? Precious, peaceful days where I’m not being hunted down like an animal. Quiet, restful nights where I can sleep without waking up a dozen times thinking there’s an emergency that needs to be dealt with. I can’t get sucked back into a routine like that when I’ve got lives to be thinking of; maybe it’s easy for you, coming and going when it suits you—but I—”_

**You think there’s no way home.**

_“_ _It’s not very likely, is it?”_

**You think I’ll leave when I get bored.**

_“_ _You will,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“There were more, before. Here, and out there, too—but they’re gone, now. I can tell. This is just—just entertainment for you, just a way for you to kill time when you’re on the subway or at lunch or home alone with nothing better to do. You won’t stay.”_

**And if I don’t leave?**

_“_ _Everyone leaves,”_ was the response, but the mental-Akira turned, finally, to look at him. He stared for a long time, as if searching for some tell, some way to prove his suspicions correct. _“How can you tell me that you won’t, and how can I know you mean it?”_

 **Because I want you to be happy** , said the first prompt, and Yusuke was tempted to choose it. So long as Akira was happy, Yuuki would be happy, too, and as long as Akira and Yusuke were connected through the screen, they could search for a way to bring Akira home for as many years as it took.

But the second prompt made him drop his phone, made him consider shoving it into the farthest corner of his room—or the apartment—or the building—as it glitched and warped and _changed_ , right before his very eyes.

 **Because I love Iiona** , it read at first—which couldn’t be right in the first place because Yusuke didn’t feel even the smallest bit for Akira what he felt for Yuuki—until at his feet, propped up by a dried wave of white paint, minutes or hours or days later, it read, **Because I love Yuuki.**

“This is absurd,” Yusuke said, to his paints and the canvas.

“Ridiculous,” he laughed to his brushes and bedspread.

But the words on the prompt didn’t change, no matter how long he paced and laughed and tried to convince himself it wasn’t real, that it was a trick of his eyes or his tired mind or both, working in conjunction to spite him. When he finally sat back down at his easel to stare at it in growing horror, the only thing he could think of to say was, “But, how?”

The app didn’t answer back. Yusuke wasn’t sure if an answer would be acceptable at this point. _Could_ he accept an answer from an app on his phone, or would he immediately check himself back into the rehab center, Nakanohara’s goodwill and their bet be damned?

A nap, he thought, would do him the most good—but he couldn’t leave the app without first exiting the Dive, and the mental-Akira wouldn’t let him leave without an answer.

 **Because I love Yuuki** , it still read as he picked up his phone, and was true, wasn’t it? Yusuke still loved him, despite the things he had told Ryuji. Yusuke still loved him, even as that love nearly ripped his heart in two, because he knew, now, that Yuuki would never love him back. Yusuke would have to live with this love for the rest of his life, feeling its sting every day as he woke from dreams where he was happy and wanted and loved back.

It was the truth, and somehow the app knew but Yusuke no longer wanted to question it. He was tired, and felt fit enough to sleep for the next week. Perhaps that was why he picked that second prompt, ticking time bomb that it was.

Static erupted across the screen before the mental-Akira could think of an answer. He sat there, frozen and staring in shock, and Yusuke got up to pace again, waiting out the tenseness in his gut. Akira surely wouldn’t cut the connection over a single prompt made in his Genometrics, would he? He couldn’t be so cruel, could he?

 _“_ _Yuuki,”_ Yusuke eventually heard over the white noise of static. It lessened, step by step and second by second. _“You—Yuuki? But—you can’t mean—”_

 _Not_ my _Yuuki_ , he was trying to say but couldn’t. _Not_ my _Yuuki_ , not when there were dozens or hundreds or thousands of Yuukis in the whole of Japan alone.

But it was, and that was the cruel reality of it: Akira’s Yuuki and the Yuuki Yusuke loved were one and the same.

 **He loves you more** , Yusuke picked.

_“_ _He does?”_

**Yes** , although Yusuke couldn’t be sure of that, not anymore, and the thought of confronting Yuuki about his relationship with Yamada sent pangs through his abdomen. Perhaps one of the others at the mixer would know, and Yusuke could bypass the angry denial he was likely to receive if he asked directly.

 _“_ _He loves me more,”_ the mental-Akira said, and there—there was the Akira that Yusuke remembered, that doting boyfriend who would have given his love the entire world without ever having to be asked. The small smile—the reverent touch to his heart, as if it would burst with happiness—that was the look that Yusuke had been trying for so long to capture.

It was a quick and easy adjustment to the portrait as the mental-Akira basked in the warmth of the knowledge that he was loved, that it was a love more than he had ever known.

 _“_ _Oh, there are so many things I want to ask, but I shouldn’t,”_ he said at last. He rubbed, idly, at his fingers even as his expression sobered. _“I can’t even convince you not to go any deeper, can I? Even if I told you that you won’t like what you see?”_

What could be there, that Akira wanted to stay hidden so badly? The truth behind his scars? The reason he kept Yuuki a secret for so long? Details behind his arrest and conviction?

Whatever it was, Yusuke would have to help Akira overcome it. His magic was too weak on its own, and the bonds he shared with his friends seemed too shallow—there were plenty of things he had to be hiding, and plenty of things they had to be hiding in turn—for them to work together properly. There was no trust there, not when all they had done was constantly hurt each other.

(Yusuke ignored the claws digging down his spine as he recalled Ryuji’s words. Was it just yesterday that he had come here, and said Yusuke couldn’t know a thing? Was it just yesterday that Yusuke, still hurt and bitter with it, had said he did?

What a hypocrite he was.

Akira didn’t need to know that, however.)

The mental-Akira didn’t give him time to respond, even if the app had let him. _“If you love him, and if you really know he loves me,”_ he said, _“then you must know him. Could you—if he’s aware of what’s going on, here, somehow—could you not tell him what you see? I’ll tell him when I can, but… I want to be the one to do it. Please.”_

Confidentiality was, unfortunately, one of Yusuke’s best skills—or it had been. Perhaps the past year or two had dulled it; perhaps he was simply tired of keeping secrets. But…

 **Yes** , he picked—he had kept this secret for so long, what was one more?

 _“_ _Great,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“And, well, you’ll tell the me waiting outside, too, won’t you? That you love Yuuki, but that Yuuki loves me more?”_

 **Yes** , he picked—although he couldn’t stop the feeling that the mental-Akira was teasing him, that this was a ploy to keep Yusuke in his place.

There were no places, here. Yusuke wasn’t even a contender.

Yuuki had made that very clear.

The mental-Akira’s expression cleared bit by bit; he lost that smile of adoration and gained something that Yusuke told himself wasn’t pity. He didn’t want pity, and certainly not Akira’s pity. _“I’m sorry. It must hurt—I can’t imagine what you’re going through. It’s just—knowing that someone else out there loves him too, knowing that even if I don’t go back, he’ll have someone—it’s nice. Kind of freeing, actually. I—I can’t be the chain tying him down forever, I don’t_ want _to be the chain tying him down forever, and now I know that even if it turns out that I can’t go back home, he won’t be alone.”_

He paused. _“For a long time, he was, wasn’t he? Long enough that he thought it would be forever—and now he won’t be. He’ll have you, and his friends, and his family. You’ll be there for him, just like how you’re here for me and Goro, right?”_

**Yes.**

_“_ _Good,”_ the mental-Akira said, with another smile. _“And now I think we’ve got somewhere to be, don’t we?”_

Yusuke walked the robot and the mental-Akira over to the door on the grassy hillside, sure that the contentment he felt was merely a by-product of finally telling Akira what Yusuke had been hiding for so long and being met with happiness. It wasn’t happiness for him, but he had been expecting more… screaming, and yelling, and to be kicked out of the app entirely.

He had not been expecting acceptance. He had no idea Akira had thought about this at all, the idea that someone could be stealing his Yuuki away while he toiled in another dimension, the idea that he could return home to Earth to discover Yuuki already happily married and devoted to someone else.

Had he—had he worried over being the wrench that ruined the harmony of the machine, or—

No. Of course he had, just as Yusuke had. They were the same in that regard.

 _“_ _Finally,”_ Morgana said as they neared the door. He was perched on a nearby rock, arms crossed and one foot tapping. _“I was beginning to think I’d have to knock you two around a bit.”_

 _“_ _For a second there I wanted to,”_ the mental-Akira admitted.

_“_ _You do realize it’s just going to get worse from here, right? I can’t help you. I won’t be able to dull even a little bit of the pain you feel; either you’re going to have to overcome all of that on your own, or—”_

_“_ _I’ve got someone strong on my side,”_ the mental-Akira assured him, and tossed a smile Yusuke’s way. _“Isn’t that right?”_

Strength was subjective. Yusuke wasn’t sure if he could stomach pure torture of the kind Yuuki had alluded to on more than one occasion, but if it was merely being a point of rationality amidst the chaos of his mind—of being the eye of the storm—then Yusuke could be strong.

Would have to be strong. For Akira, and for Yuuki.

 _“_ _You’re impossible,”_ Morgana muttered.

_“_ _But you love me anyway. That’s why you did all of this, isn’t it?”_

Morgana groaned. _“I just gave you a good enough excuse to run wild for a while, but it did do what I wanted in the end. That deep bond you two share—you know what it is, now. Whether that will propel you forward or hold you back is up to you.”_

 _“_ _It will be hard not asking after him, now that I can,”_ the mental-Akira agreed. _“But we still have a world to save, don’t we, and it—it won’t be long before I’m home again. I have to believe that.”_

 _“_ _At least you’ve learned not to rush so much,”_ Morgana said, then sighed. _“But, fine—you’ll manage, won’t you? I’ve got to believe in you, too.”_

And they grinned at each other, hands reaching out at the same time to open the door, spilling light across the hill and Yusuke’s screen.

And Yusuke wondered how he was ever going to break the news to the real Akira without complete and total rejection. His mind was one thing, but Akira himself wouldn’t take kindly to it. He’d gone for so long without saying so much as a peep—his only slip of the tongue being when the robot was destroyed—and to find out that all of his secrets were known this whole time?

He would do his best to protect himself, and if that meant rejection—

Yusuke shuddered. First Yuuki, then Ryuji, and now Akira—was he not meant to have friends after all?

(When, exactly, had he begun to consider Akira his friend?)

As they came to in the Dive Shop and the technician gathered up the thought crystals for them, Yusuke bit the bullet: **You’re from Earth.**

 _“_ _I’m not as surprised as I thought I’d be, hearing that,”_ Akira said. He still looked tired, but the exhaustion that had plagued him before seemed lesser, as if the destructive spree in his mind had been therapeutic. The wash of relief down Yusuke’s spine almost made it worth it. _“But I am, yes. I didn’t want to tell you because it’s—it’s complicated. I’m not sure even I understand all of it.”_

Soul summoning and abject torture and minds shattered into pieces like jigsaw puzzles—Yusuke knew more than Akira thought he did, and it still didn’t feel like enough. No amount of knowledge would ever be enough.

Akira frowned in thought as the technician handed over the crystals; he touched one at random and said, _“Don’t tell me you know about it already.”_

**Only a little.**

_“_ _It’s better than nothing,”_ Akira said, _“and it would explain this feeling I’ve been getting. It’s almost like we’re on the same wavelength, sometimes. Maybe it’s because we’re from the same place.”_

He waved goodbye to the technician, hand still holding his crystal. He turned it over and over, watching as light glared off its surface, and Yusuke didn’t push him even as the app gave him prompts.

He was rewarded when Akira added, _“Maybe it’s because you know me, or_ of _me. I—someone once told me my parents, there on Earth, were looking for me. It was more than I thought they’d do. It’s… still more than I thought they’d do.”_

**You miss them.**

_“_ _I never saw them enough to start missing them now,”_ he said. _“There were just—just things I wanted to tell them, and things I wish they’d told me, too, and—and now I might never have the chance for either. Even if we do manage to save these people, there might not be a way for me to go home.”_

**But there might be.**

Akira laughed. _“You sound so certain. What makes you so sure? What if it’s like time, and there’s only one way to go?”_

How could Akira ask that, after time traveling himself—or did that, too, require obscene amounts of energy that Akira wouldn’t have the nerve to ask for?

 **There has to be a way.** Even if it meant breaking the laws of space-time; even if it meant cold sleep on the Soreil as it drifted through space for an eternity.

But Akira smiled, a soft and pitying thing. There was no way he’d lost hope so easily; perhaps he was just trying to be realistic, not trying to put too much faith in a solution that would never come.

**Yuuki is waiting for you.**

Akira froze. _“Don’t say that.”_

**He loves you very much.**

_“_ _Don’t_ say _that.”_

**He loves you more than I love him.**

_“_ _You?”_ Akira asked, slowly, as if the word had to be dragged out of him. As if he only asked to be sure. _“You—and Yuuki—I don’t—Don’t_ say _that—”_

**It’s the truth.**

But Akira said nothing more, as they continued back down the street to the save point. Yusuke would let him rest for a bit, then come back and hope the app was still on his phone.

It was only as they got close that Akira said, in a strangled voice that promised tears, _“Does he love you back?”_

That was easy enough to answer. **No.**

Yusuke pretended the look of relief on Akira’s face was only from the promise of impending solitude and not from the fact that Yuuki would never—could never—love Yusuke. Yuuki would never think of Yusuke in the same way he thought of Akira and Yamada—

And Yusuke was very, very tired.

* * *

This was a bad idea.

Shinya stared at the floor of the subway car, willing it to open up and swallow him whole. Kaoru yawned next to him, tired after the long talk he and his dad had last night—Kaoru hadn’t gone to bed until after one in the morning, and then he’d woken up early to make breakfast and get his chores started. And now—

“You don’t have to come,” Shinya told him again.

“But I want to,” Kaoru said. “How else is your mom going to believe you made a friend?”

That wasn’t the problem. Shinya lied about having friends all the time; she’d believe that. She’d probably also believe that they’d been so busy goofing off that he’d forgotten to text her or call her back. It wasn’t unusual, he thought, for that to happen.

What was unusual was the amount of calls he’d gotten. The texts and voicemails went from inquisitive to mildly concerned to screaming outright. She’d called the police.

With all the news of missing kids, Shinya didn’t blame her, but it was going to be annoying. She was going to ground him. She was going to keep him home and take time off from work to make sure he wasn’t sneaking out, like some kind of jailer.

 **I DIDNT RAISE YOU TO BE LIKE THIS** , one text had read. It made Shinya think that she hadn’t raised him at all, that he was going to go from coddled schoolkid to clueless adult and she wouldn’t care. She’d probably blame him for it.

And there was no way he wanted Kaoru involved. Not Kaoru, who despite being kidnapped by the yakuza was surprisingly okay. Not Kaoru, who was probably hiding his trauma by pretending to be a good kid and taking him home while his dad went to work—and at Kaoru’s insistence, of course.

Shinya huffed. “It’s not that. She’ll probably think you kidnapped me or something.”

“Uh—wait, really?”

“And don’t mention the yakuza, or she’ll think you’re a member and call the cops.”

“Uh—”

“If you come, you’re going to be her scapegoat,” Shinya grit out. He didn’t like the look Kaoru was giving him, but what else could he say? Nothing? That wouldn’t help Kaoru escape her wrath in the slightest.

But Kaoru frowned, staring out at the subway wall as it went by. “Does she do that a lot?”

“Only all the time,” Shinya confirmed.

“And if I don’t go, she’ll just question you,” Kaoru guessed, “which won’t go so well, either, so—I’m going, and that’s final. I’ve got to be a responsible role model, don’t I?”

Shinya had to question what kind of kid ever wanted to get yelled at by an adult; it was probably the same kind of kid who could come back from a yakuza abduction and not be scared shitless over the next time he left his house.

In other words, it was Kaoru.

“You’re weird,” Shinya told him as the train pulled into his station.

“So you tell me.”

Shinya was too antsy to grin at the remark, and Kaoru’s slipped from his face the closer they got to Shinya’s apartment, but that wasn’t the weird thing; as Shinya fished for his key in the recesses of his pocket, Kaoru’s hand slipped into his free one. It was warm and kind of clammy.

“What’s that for?” Shinya asked.

“Dunno,” Kaoru said, with a crooked grin. “Somehow I’m more nervous now than I was last night. If you don’t like it, just let go.”

Finally, there was his key. “Mom won’t like it if she sees it.”

“She’s already going to be yelling, isn’t she?”

“You need to watch the news more,” Shinya said, scowling as his hand shook and the key missed the lock a dozen times over. His mom was going to be angry—no, livid—and Kaoru was going to learn what a shit parent Shinya had. Kaoru was going to pity him, and his mom was going to hate Kaoru, and all over a bunch of fucking missed calls.

It was stupid. It was so damn stupid.

Was it too late to wish she wasn’t like this?

Was it too late to wish she hadn’t opened the door and pulled him halfway inside? Her arms squeezed him so tightly it felt as if she was trying to snap him in two; Kaoru’s hand was tugged out of his, and he searched blindly for it again. “Shinya, God,” his mom was saying, “you worried me half to death! Where were you? What happened? Something happened, didn’t it?”

“I just forgot to check my phone,” he said into her shoulder.

“Because something _happened_!” she insisted. Her bear hug turned into needles on his face as she gripped it, her nails digging in. Did she even know how much it hurt?

Did she even care?

“Something had to have happened, for you not to check your phone,” she said, searching his face over for bruises or injuries. They weren’t even inside; Shinya could hear one of their neighbors poke their head out into the hall to watch. “Were you hurt? I swear, Shinya, if someone hurt you—”

“I’m fine,” he snapped, and wondered if fingernails could leave bruises. He’d love to explain that to his classmates, or his teachers, or the principal.

Fuck.

“We really did just lose track of time,” Kaoru piped up at last.

And just like that, her laser focus shifted. She pulled Shinya in closer, tighter. “And who are you?”

“He’s—” Shinya tried to answer, but nearly buckled under her weight as she drew herself up.

“Hush, Shinya,” his mom said, and dug her fingers into his shoulder. “You don’t need to stand up for him. He’s the reason you didn’t call me, isn’t he?”

“We were playing a game on my phone—” Shinya broke off with a wince as her nails dug in again. His face had to be red; it felt raw and tender and stung like a dozen bee stings.

He couldn’t even see Kaoru like this. The most he could see was the inside of his apartment, immaculately clean despite her worry.

But Kaoru picked up his slack easily enough. “—and we didn’t know you were trying to call until it was late. Sorry, ma’am; I’m Kaoru, by the way.”

“And what grade are you in, Kaoru?”

“Oh, uh—tenth. Ma’am.”

“And you’re friends with my Shinya?”

“Yes,” Kaoru said, and from the pressure on his shoulder Shinya knew it wasn’t going to be true for long.

“A high schooler, friends with my Shinya,” his mom spat. He could hear the sneer on her face. “A high school _delinquent_ , friends with my Shinya! It’s no wonder he’s turning out like this if he’s got friends like _you_!”

“It’s a birthmark,” Kaoru countered, feeble and sheepish. His hand went to cover it, then fiddled with the collar of his shirt.

“Kaoru’s not a delinquent,” Shinya said. Kaoru was anything but; he stayed home and did chores and only ever ventured outside for cram school or to see his dad or, lately, to meet up with Shinya. Kaoru liked his weird phone game. Kaoru was a big, stupid geek on the inside.

“Hush, Shinya. Let your mother teach this boy what his place is—”

“You’re hurting me,” he said.

“I am not hurting you, dear, now—”

“Well, it _hurts_! It hurts, and Kaoru’s _not_ a delinquent, and you’re a fucking _moron_ for thinking so!”

He shoved her off, heard her hit the door or the wall and gasp in surprise, and though it hurt to leave her there, he didn’t want to stay; he grabbed Kaoru and ran for it, his mom’s screams and cries and the titters of the neighbors falling behind as they left the apartment.

They had barely been there for five minutes. Shinya had dropped his key, too.

But that didn’t matter. If his mom didn’t like his friends, then he didn’t want to be there, listening as she listed everything wrong with them. There was nothing wrong with Kaoru other than his nosiness and the birthmark on his neck Shinya had never asked about.

His mom thought it was a _tattoo_. Dumbass.

“Shinya,” Kaoru panted, “are you sure you should leave like that?”

“She’s fine,” he said. Was he sneering, too? Had that come out too harshly?

Was he just like her, in the end?

“Won’t she be worried?”

“She’s always worried,” Shinya said, and once he said it, the rest of it tumbled out: “and she always complains, like nothing’s good enough for her or for me. I got an eighty on my math test once, and she called the school and said the test was too hard. Then, when they stopped giving out as much homework, she called them again and said they weren’t preparing me for ‘real life’ or ‘real education.’ And if I ever told her about any of my classmates, she’d call and complain about them, too, like they were dragging me down just by existing.”

He slowed down. His mom, if she was chasing them, was nowhere in sight. Shinya’s legs burned, and his heart hammered, and he was panting like a dog, but he couldn’t hear her yells anymore, just the conversations of the passer-by around them.

Kaoru’s hand was sweaty in his, but he gripped harder to keep him close. Who cared what kind of impression he was giving? Who gave a single shit what any of them thought? Why couldn’t he hold his friend’s hand when he wanted to?

“I hate her,” he told Kaoru. “I _hate_ her.”

“Yeah,” Kaoru said, though whether he was agreeing or acknowledging, Shinya didn’t know.

They walked back to the station. Shinya reveled in the hush of the train ride and the quiet pressure of Kaoru’s presence and their hands, squeezing until the blood ran out of their fingers. It was more than he’d ever gotten before from anybody.

It was more than his mom had ever given him.


	17. Summer Vacation, The Second Tuesday, Afternoon & Evening

Yuuki wasn’t quite sure what to do in Ren’s hometown, so after breakfast and having Mrs. Amamiya press a neatly-packed bento box into his hands, he wandered. He walked up and down streets and over to the high school where there were no less than two dozen missing persons posters clinging to the wall out front; he walked to the local shops, where every storefront had a missing persons poster in the window; he ate lunch in a park, where the trees were blessedly poster-free.

He could imagine Ren doing the same. Wandering the same streets, buying steamed buns from the convenience store when it was cold out, showing tourists the sights. If the trees in the park were cherry trees, they’d probably come just to see those. Ren would have a picnic lunch on hand in the spring, ready for any lucky tourist who got to him first.

Ren didn’t sketch very many tourists, though he took careful notes of who came with who and what their relations were and questioned whether they were lying or not. The pair of businesswomen sitting too far apart, as if maintaining that careful distance, contrasting with the ease with which a trio of salarymen joked around; the couple on their way back from a hot springs honeymoon versus the stiffness of an enforced family vacation.

Ren thought and thought and wrote down more questions than answers and Yuuki wondered if he ever got any closure on it all, before he’d disappeared. Probably not; Yuuki doubted whether there was anyone in this whole town he could ask these things to, though there had to be at least one person who would understand—

“Hi there!”

He shut the sketchbook on a scribble that seemed more mindless than it was intentional, as if Ren had been distracting himself by drawing it. There was a woman in front of him, all big red grin and faint wisps of gray in her hair and sunglasses glinting in the light filtering through the trees.

There was no one else around.

And—was that a camera around her neck?

“Um, hi,” Yuuki said.

“Ichiko Ohya,” said the woman, without any prompting. She reached in her back pocket, retrieved a business card, and handed it over. “Journalist.”

“Um,” Yuuki said, staring at her card. A journalist in Ren’s hometown couldn’t be a good thing, could it?

“Mind if I sit?”

Against his better judgment, he said, “No, uh, go ahead.”

She plopped down. Everything in her fanny pack rustled; the water bottle clipped to the side made a dull thud. She took a drink and said, “I never like to beat around the bush, so… You’re the kid visiting the Amamiyas, right?”

A journalist, and the Amamiyas had said the paparazzi had been snooping around.

Ohya shrugged at the look he gave her. “I’m not staking out their house anymore—”

“ _Anymore_?” he asked.

“—and besides, half the town knew _somebody_ was coming,” Ohya went on, ignoring him. “The only question was who it could have been, to get the missus so happy like that? And it turned out to be you, huh.”

She looked him up and down, pausing at the rings on his neck. She grinned, and it was like Yamada—like Kamoshida—all over again. Yuuki jumped up, or tried to; Ohya had the faster reflexes and caught his arm and hauled him back down.

“Aw, come on,” she said, “don’t you want to talk about it?”

“No,” he said.

“Not even a little?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Yuuki said.

“Sure there is, Yuuki,” she said, and grinned even harder as he froze. Forget Yamada; Ohya was the shark, scenting blood in the water and going in for the kill. Her teeth were even a bit pink from her lipstick. He could feel her looming over him. “Just a few questions, okay?”

“It’s never just a few.” The police, when they’d come back to Shujin after Niijima’s arrest. Just a few questions, they’d said, but those few questions had taken over an hour to answer, and that was back when he didn’t know anything. “Let go.”

“Look, I’m not really here as a reporter, okay?”

“You introduced yourself as one!”

“Because it’s what I do,” she said, and Yuuki wished that somebody—anybody, maybe even the local stray dog—would show up and startle Ohya just enough to make her let go so he could run back to the Amamiyas. “Look, I won’t report anything you tell me! Journalist’s honor!”

“There’s no such thing!”

“There is,” she said, and he made the mistake of looking at her and the fierce determination of a professional that blazed in her eyes. “If I oust a source even once, I’ve lost all integrity as a journalist. If no one trusts us enough to speak up, that’s when the bad guys win.”

“That’s never worked, anyway,” he said. Kamoshida hadn’t gone to jail because of a _newspaper_ _article_ , after all. Madarame hadn’t had to fess up to his crimes until after Yusuke had nearly starved to death under his care.

“Because you’re used to the idea that no one wants to hear what you’ve got to say,” Ohya said, “and because you think no one else is going to tell you they’re sorry you had shoulder all of this yourself. I had the app, too, but in the end I couldn’t do a thing to help that poor kid. You did that, didn’t you? You kept at it and now—”

 _Now I’ve got to watch a bunch of bumbling idiots stumble their way around the Soreil playing at being heroes,_ he wanted to say. _Now I’ve got to watch as they blame me for all of their problems even though I have only marginally more information about the app than they do._

Instead he grit his teeth.

“It has to be hard,” Ohya finished, “but running from everyone isn’t going to make anything easier.”

“I’m not running,” he said. Ohya tugged him back down to the bench, dug around in her pack, then offered him a piece of candy. “I’m not five.”

“Everybody likes candy!”

It was clearly an offer he wasn’t allowed to refuse; he took it, twisted the wrap tighter and tighter until the plastic complained.

Ohya popped her own piece in her mouth and talked around it. “I’m just gonna go out on a limb here and say it was hard. Helping him was hard. I know it was for me; I barely had time to eat back then, much less pay attention to some kid in my phone. I think I wound up getting rid of it right before the news about that politician broke, and boy, did I feel like shit after.”

“Let me guess: you don’t have pets, either,” Yuuki muttered, and Ohya grinned.

“Sure don’t,” she said. “Anyway, I guess I just wanted to say sorry. There were plenty of people like me out there who couldn’t spare him any time, and now you’re the one who has to deal with the backlash. If I let some kid like you get torn to pieces by the rage mob, I don’t think I’ll ever live it down.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Oh, I know. I was thinking of writing up an article about all of this, but then I almost scared you off, so never mind that.” She shrugged. “Now I just want to know what kind of guy stuck around for so long. You’ve even got the Amamiyas on your side, and with how pushy they were with those kidnapping allegations, it’s really surprising.”

It was his turn to shrug. “They’re good people. And—and no one will believe any article about this, okay? That app came from space, and all anyone could do was think it was a virus.”

“Huh,” Ohya said, and while she was expecting more, Yuuki didn’t offer anything else. He knew what she wanted but didn’t want to give it to her, didn’t want to be put in the spotlight anymore. Kamoshida had ways of making anyone squirm under the weight of two dozen gazes; Yuuki had taken his share and then some, until even the thought of having someone watch him do the most mundane of tasks was enough to make him break out in a cold sweat.

Watching Akira, though—that had been different. Akira always knew Yuuki was there unless he was deep in his crafting fugue or out gathering, and Akira had always acknowledged his presence. Akira had made him feel wanted, and needed, and not as if he was a burden just by existing.

Akira had made him feel everything Yuuki had thought he’d lost, all the wants and desires Yuuki had buried slowly resurfacing as he started to hope that maybe there was one person out there who wanted him around.

If Akira had only wanted him for the lost memories they were recovering, there would have been no need for the banter, or the inane conversations, or the one-sided flirting. If Akira had only wanted him for the memories, he would have asked to look at them more. Instead he wanted to talk, and to teach Yuuki to cook, and to read out loud from his books. They had gone months before touching that first memory; they had gone weeks in between the rest, and Akira had never pushed or questioned when the next one would surface.

Akira had just been lonely.

Ren had been lonely, too.

“He just wanted a friend,” Yuuki told Ohya. “Just someone to talk to because he had no one else. Wasn’t he always happy to see you? Wasn’t he always waiting for you to go back to him?”

And then Yuuki had tossed him aside, had made him give up the only bit of happiness he had, pretend or not, and while Akira was fighting for his life and the lives of an entire planet, Yuuki was running off kissing boys and visiting the Amamiyas and worrying about his grades.

He was no better than Ohya, in the end.

“Why are you really here?” he asked. “Why have you been stalking the Amamiyas for months? This can’t be just about an article. What are you really after?”

She winced but didn’t protest; anyone who would point a camera into the Amamiya’s house was no better than a stalker and she had seen him, whether it was at the station or the house. Ohya took another drink from her bottle and said, “You’ll think it’s crazy. Crazier than a weird app from space, anyway.”

“Try me.”

“Alright,” she said. “There are people out there who want to be next. To disappear, go to another world, and become a hero. The Amamiya kid’s disappearance and the app everyone has on their phone now is all the proof they need that it can happen, and they want it to.”

“They want to—they want to _go_ there? It’s not all fun and games; don’t they know that?”

“Sure they do,” she said with another shrug, “but they want to be heroes more. They want people to look at them in awe and give them rewards just for existing and beating up a few monsters. They hate it here, where they’re nobodies and looked down on; that’s what my article was going to be about. From Zero to Hero: How Japan’s Youth Idolizes Another World… or something like that.”

“If you wanted that kind of proof, all you had to do was watch some anime.”

She snorted. “Believe me, I did. I’ve got over a dozen references to the isekai craze and how it’s all built up to this. No one really wants to live here anymore, Japan’s economy is dying, and it’s all thanks to kids who look at their parents and wonder how they can ever compare.

“But you—you know what it’s like. Amamiya had to have confided in you at some point, right? He doesn’t want to stay there in that other world; he wants to come home to his family. If I can get the truth out there, maybe some of the weaker followers will decide it’s not worth it.”

“Followers?”

“They’ve got a pretty large online following,” Ohya said, tugging out her phone. “They even mention your forum—here.”

He didn’t have to look for very long—or he couldn’t, as his stomach twisted just looking at the name. **Journey to Ra Ciela** , like it was a travel brochure for visiting England and not a group of men and women who had lost their minds and wanted to go to another dimension.

All of these people who _wanted_ to, and the ones who were taken _didn’t_.

He passed it back after a few seconds. Ohya didn’t press him to look more.

Yuuki had done this. Somehow his forum, intended to help people help Akira, was becoming a meeting ground for people who wished they could disappear.

“They’re insane,” he said.

“Yeah, probably are,” Ohya agreed.

“They don’t—they don’t know anything. They don’t know what he went through to get where he is now; do they think he just—just walked in and started fighting, all on his own?”

“A few of us have been trying to discourage their thinking,” Ohya said. “We didn’t get very far ourselves, but it was enough for us to realize that that wasn’t a world just anyone could visit. It wasn’t… you know, friendly.”

“It’s not,” he said, thinking of the mob ripping the clothes off Akira’s back. Of the CEO who wanted to turn him into another server so his newest line of trons would be superior to the ones run by Goro. Of an airship being blown to pieces just because Akira had learned things he shouldn’t have; of an amusement park built to brainwash criminals like Akira’s friends.

How Akira had whimpered in his sleep some nights. _“It hurts,”_ he had moaned, and woke up crying, checking to see if Yuuki was awake and listening. Yuuki always pretended he wasn’t, and Akira would cry and shake as he went to wash his face, whispering words to himself that the monitor couldn’t pick up.

Not to mention what had happened to Goro. Yuuki hated thinking about it.

“You don’t know how badly they were hurt,” he said. “You don’t—you don’t know anything.”

“Yeah,” Ohya said. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”

“What makes you think I’d tell you the truth?”

“Because you want those two to come home. Because you stuck around longer than anyone else did; that’s got to mean something, right?”

It meant that Akira had come to need him, and Yuuki had come to need him, too.

But.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want the Amamiyas to find out what Aki—their son’s been going through from an article. It wouldn’t be right; they should know, too.”

She blinked. “Then we can all hear it together.”

“Do you really think they want to meet with the reporter who’s been stalking them for months?”

“But they won’t be meeting with me,” she said simply. “We’ll just so happen to be meeting with _you_ so you can tell us about Amamiya. They won’t have to say a word to me if they don’t want to.”

“That doesn’t mean they’ll agree.”

“Then the worst that can happen is that you’ll have to explain it twice.”

Four times, he wanted to correct. The first was with Ms. Akechi and his friends; the second was with Takamaki. Ohya and the Amamiyas would make it four times.

He wondered if it would ever get easier. Probably not.

Then he wondered if he could go through it twice in the next couple of days. Definitely not.

“I’ll ask,” he sighed, “but don’t expect them to say yes.”

“Great,” Ohya said, and her grin seemed a bit dimmer than before, though it was still wide and full of teeth. “Let me know what they say, alright? You’ve got my number.”

The business card, tucked to Ren’s sketchbook. Right.

He nodded, and this time when he left, Ohya didn’t stop him.

* * *

Ryuji slumped in his seat. As badly as he wanted to stretch out, this was Ann’s couch, not his. He wouldn’t feel right claiming that much space.

He didn’t feel right, period.

“Here you go,” Ann said, putting down a mug of something steaming. If he knew Ann, it was hot chocolate.

He did know Ann. It _was_ hot chocolate.

That didn’t make him feel better.

“Thanks,” he said, after a scorching mouthful.

“So, what’s got you down in the dumps?”

“Everything,” he said. If he fell over his head could rest on her shoulder; it felt like it would be an invasion of privacy. “I don’t wanna bug ya about it.”

“Try me,” she said, and stole his idea. Her hair tickled his arm; he could smell her as she curled up into his side. Ryuji wanted to ignore the cups and the TV and just hold her until everything was right again, which would probably be forever.

Didn’t sound too bad, honestly.

“Thought you wanted to hang out.”

“This is hanging out. We don’t have to watch TV and make comments about the commercials to be hanging out, you know. So spill.”

“It’s dumb.”

“It’s not dumb if you’re worrying about it.”

But it was dumb, he wanted to say. The only reason he was here in Ann’s apartment was because Suzui had left earlier that morning to make it in time for a PT session in the afternoon. Ryuji had helped Ann see her off at the station; Ryuji had stood by and endured the overly-long hug the girls had shared, then endured his own from Suzui.

“You be good to her,” Suzui had murmured, and all he had managed to say back was a very boring, “Yeah.”

And dumping all of his problems on her definitely wasn’t being good to her.

Ann let him think for a while, the TV playing some game show in the background. The crowd cheered as the contestants raced for… something, and all he could think about was the crash of plates on the floor. How he’d almost punched Yusuke. How Yusuke had sat there, blank-faced like it wasn’t bothering him, and called Yuuki a whore just for kissing a guy in an alley. How Yusuke had dared Ryuji to punch him, knowing damn well he wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

“Or,” Ann said, “we don’t have to talk.”

She pushed him over until his head hit the armrest, crawled up his chest, and kissed him. She tasted like chocolate. Her hair was everywhere. The crowd on the TV cheered; Ryuji slipped his hands into her hair and tugged her closer every time she moved back for air.

He wondered what she wanted.

He wondered what she thought he wanted.

“One day you gotta tell me your problems,” he said at some point, because relationships weren’t just about kissing and sex and constant griping. What did that mean, that he had a better grasp on reality than half the damn planet?

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “It’s pretty boring. Catty model stuff, petty model stuff. They called me fat because they couldn’t see the vertebrae of my spine in a backless dress, you know, stuff like that.”

“You’re not fat.”

“No, but I eat like I am, which is all that matters,” she said, and sighed, then laid her head down on his chest. “And I’m not smart enough to get into uni here without tons of studying, no thanks to that lost year.”

“You’re smarter than me.” Her desk was covered in books and loose papers and cups of pens. Empty pens and balled up scrap paper and used noodle cups and disposable chopsticks sat in the wastebasket on the floor; it was more effort than he put in by several miles. His ma might have had a heart attack if he got that serious about studying.

“Thanks,” she mumbled. “But, like I said, it’s all boring stuff. You can hold me, if you want.”

He could? “You ain’t worried?”

“You’re not Kamoshida. I’ll be fine.”

That was a bald-faced lie if he ever heard one; he slipped an arm around her back and she stiffened just slightly before relaxing into it. “I don’t want to hurt you, Ann.”

“And I don’t want that bastard haunting me forever,” she countered. “I want to do normal stuff like this without thinking about him and what he’d do, so just hug me, damn it.”

“And I don’t wanna push you,” he said back. He didn’t let go; holding her was too nice to do something dumb like that.

“That’s why you’re better than him. Now spill.”

“It’s dumb.”

“You said that already,” she said.

“Because it’s dumb. I don’t—I don’t even understand it. I don’t get a thing.”

“So talk it out with me.”

How could he, when her heart was racing as fast as his was and he could feel it through his fingertips? How could he, when it was Yusuke’s and Yuuki’s and Yamada’s problems, not Ryuji’s? How could he, when he didn’t understand anything, at all?

How could he when his phone was ringing?

Ann picked it up off the table. “It’s Yusuke,” she said, and moved to pass it to him, but he groaned and pushed it away.

He had a feeling he knew what Yusuke wanted to say.

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he grunted. After a pause he added, “I almost punched him.”

“Wha—Yusuke? Really?”

“Yeah.”

Ann stared at the phone in her hand, still ringing. “And you want to just ignore him.”

“He called Yuuki a whore. Why wouldn’t I want to ignore him?”

“He said that?” Ryuji nodded. “Why?”

Ryuji sighed. The phone stopped ringing as it went to voicemail; pinged with a text message, then started ringing again.

Ann watched it all go down and said, “He wants you to pick up.”

Ryuji groaned. The game show gave way to another game show; Ryuji wondered how many of those there were, that they could fill up a whole channel with nothing but game shows where the host was incredibly fake and the guests were incredibly stupid. “I don’t want to talk to him.”

“Huh,” she said, and picked up. “Hi, Yusuke!”

Yusuke’s answering rumble was lost to cheers as the game show host danced his way onstage.

“Yeah, he’s here. He doesn’t want to talk to you, though, that’s why I picked up.”

She listened, and nodded, and pretty soon the TV was on mute and Ryuji’s phone was resting on his collarbone. Static erupted from the other end as Yusuke did… something on speakerphone.

“I’d like to apologize,” he said, without much prompting. “What I said—it was wrong of me to. Yuuki is our friend, and while I’d like to think he wouldn’t betray Akira that way, the unfortunate reality is that he did, no matter how small the action.”

In other words, he wasn’t changing his mind. Yusuke waited for Ryuji to say something—to say anything—but Ryuji wasn’t about to. He was gripping Ann’s shirt so hard his fingers were going numb. Ann’s pulse still raced.

He felt like shit.

“A simple kiss would have been one thing, I believe, but this was not a simple kiss,” Yusuke said. “There was—ah. Um. Quite a bit of moaning involved.”

“Who Yuuki makes out with in a back alley is his business,” Ryuji said, because… seriously? Were they really about to rehash the argument over the phone? “I told you that. I also told you that that’s his and Akira’s business, not ours.”

Yusuke let out a long sigh that broke into static. “Ryuji—”

“Don’t tell me you’re pissed he didn’t pick you.”

“I’m not. Not anymore—”

“Anymore? So you _were_?”

“Of course I was,” Yusuke practically spit, and it was the closest thing to angry as Ryuji had ever heard from him. “Of _course_ I was—but I’ve accepted that as much as I can at the moment, Ryuji, but if you’d heard half the comments—if you’d seen their faces—”

“The guys from the mixer?”

“They all seemed convinced that there was something more to it,” Yusuke said, “and one of the girls remarked that Yamada would finally have a new toy to play with. That’s when I left and found them in an alley. If that spreads around, Yuuki’s reputation will be _ruined_ , Ryuji.”

He wanted to say that people weren’t that cruel—but they were. That one salesman had turned down a sale just because Yuuki wasn’t buying for a girl. There were kids who got bullied out of school just for liking the wrong person.

It was shit.

But, Yamada with a new toy? The same Yamada who looked like a lost puppy in the rain at the station, who turned into a skittish mess the next day? _That_ Yamada? Ryuji wasn’t sure if a simple college kid could have that kind of acting skills.

Then again, Ryuji wasn’t sure of much anymore.

“And if we say that what’s-her-name is just a conniving snake, how many people will listen to us?” Ryuji asked.

“It won’t matter what we say,” Yusuke said. “All it takes is one bad rumor—one slip of the tongue—and everything will be ruined, regardless. They don’t have to believe it to say it.”

He should’ve gotten that Yamada guy’s number while he had the chance. He should’ve done a lot of things, like make sure Yuuki didn’t go to that mixer.

“So you think just because people are gonna talk, that means you can call him a whore?”

“They’ll call him that themselves whether or not Akira returns.”

And that would do all the damage. Right.

But—Yusuke had been the only one from the mixer to see them in the alley. If what’s-her-name was already spreading rumors and then Akira came back—it wouldn’t matter whether Yuuki and Yamada were kissing in a back alley or if they stopped just so Yuuki could puke out of nerves, the whole mess was already in motion.

“They’d call him that even if he hadn’t made out with Yamada,” Ryuji said. “They’d call him that anyway, so what makes you think you can say it?”

There was nothing for a while. Ann tucked one of her hands beneath Ryuji; her fingers were ice-cold, and her expression was serious, and she was shaking. Whether it was with rage or not, Ryuji didn’t know.

He was so sick of the shitty things people said and did, though. He was so _sick_ of it.

“I don’t know,” Yusuke said at last.

“You don’t—you don’t effing know?”

“I don’t,” Yusuke affirmed. “I was—I was angry and bitter when I said it at first, yes, but… That might not excuse me saying it at all, but eventually someone is going to ask how I came to be friends with—”

“Who cares what they think?”

“That’s how people work, Ryuji. They talk and talk and it never matters if what they say is the truth or not; they’ll believe what they like and convince others to do the same, and the ones who sit outside of it all can very easily be pushed aside in favor of those who do not.”

“The only thing I got outta that is that you care more about what others think of you than you do about your own friends.”

“It’s—” Yusuke broke off with a sigh. “I only worry for him. If companies get even a whiff of this, what do you think will happen?”

Yuuki would be unemployed or busking tables at Leblanc for the rest of his life. That wouldn’t mean he could never take on freelance work, but if he wanted stable income, a cushy IT job at some big company was the best way to do it.

“What if Yamada said it wasn’t true?” Ann asked. “If he pitched in, wouldn’t that help?”

“What’s-her-name could be a jealous ex, for all we know,” Ryuji said.

“That is a very cruel picture to paint,” Yusuke said, “but—perhaps it might work, perhaps it might not.” He sighed again.

“That doesn’t mean we can’t try!”

“But that doesn’t mean that it will work,” Yusuke said.

Yusuke probably knew best just how snobby people were. He’d lived for years under a plagiarist, he had to have picked up on some things. Ann, too, with her coworker’s comments on how she was fat and stupid just for being a teenager who liked cake and lived in a foreign country once.

People were stupid.

“That doesn’t mean that we can’t try,” Ryuji repeated, feeling the growl leave his throat. “Yuuki’s our friend; are you really going to sit back and let these assholes drag him through the dirt?”

“And us?” Yusuke asked. “Are we still friends?”

Ryuji wanted to say yes. He also wanted to say no. Just because they’d gotten along so far didn’t mean they were meant to stay friends, and Ryuji wasn’t sure if he’d be able to handle calling Yusuke his friend after yesterday. It didn’t matter if what Yusuke said was true, he still said it.

Ryuji didn’t want to be comfortable with that. “I don’t know,” he said.

“You’re still angry,” Yusuke guessed.

“Yeah, I am,” Ryuji said.

“That’s—that’s understandable. Perfectly reasonable. May I—may I still call?”

Because Yusuke wouldn’t have anybody else except Futaba, after all this was over, and he definitely wouldn’t want to talk to Yuuki. Ann was looking at his phone or the TV, and not at him as he said, “No, I—I don’t think that’s a good idea. Text me; that’ll be better.”

“I see,” Yusuke said, a maybe it was his imagination, but the guy sounded disappointed and relieved at the same time. He wasn’t being completely cut off—Ryuji couldn’t be that cruel—but he wasn’t going to be getting what he wanted, either. “I will do that, then. Have a good night.”

Ryuji grunted. Ann called out a “Good night!” and moved his phone back to the table once Yusuke hung up.

They sat in silence for a while, the TV remote hanging limp in Ann’s hand. It was probably a good thing; Ryuji wasn’t sure if he could deal with any more cheering for the day.

“You think you’ll ever forgive him?” Ann asked.

“Who knows?” It was a toss-up at the end of the day: on the one hand, he and Yusuke weren’t close enough to share too many hobbies. Yusuke liked his art shit, and Ryuji didn’t understand that crap unless it was in a magazine as pin-up art; Yusuke never had enough money to go to the gym, either, which meant they couldn’t do that—not that Yusuke seemed to even care about getting enough exercise. Ryuji was the one constantly worrying, but people had led even worse lifestyles than Yusuke’s and lived to be eighty or ninety, so what was the point?

But, on the other hand, Ann and Ryuji were the only two people in all of Tokyo who knew Yusuke’s feelings for Yuuki. If they weren’t friends, Yusuke wouldn’t have admitted to it so easily. He would have said something dumb about respecting Yuuki’s relationship and not practicing such uncouth behavior like developing a crush, as if he’d willed it to happen.

Yusuke was goddamn stupid sometimes.

… Which was why Ryuji didn’t want to say that he could never forgive the guy. He was probably just spouting off all the bullshit he’d heard growing up surrounded by snobs.

It was—it was true bullshit, but still.

Eventually, though, Ann got tired of waiting for him to explain, or of the panoramic shots of the cheering studio audience, and said, “I’m gonna change the channel.”

Ryuji was too tired to worry about what she would change it to. He was sweating where she was draped over him but he couldn’t find the willpower to move. “Sure thing,” he said.

He’d earned himself a break.

* * *

There were a lot of things Yuuki would never look forward to: tests, exams, volleyballs spiked at his face, dealing with that one pompous guy at Leblanc who thought that being a vlogger movie critic was a job on par with national security, talking about his feelings…

And, naturally, talking about Akira.

The Amamiyas had set out five places at the table that had only seen two people for years; the wood groaned under the platters and bowls Mrs. Amamiya had prepared ever since he came back inside from a short phone call with Ohya.

(Of course he’d asked as soon as he could. The sooner he got it over with, the better, right?)

He was surprised the Amamiyas had even agreed to this. He was surprised they could act so cordial with the woman who had been peering into their house for months on end.

He was surprised they’d called Ms. Akechi, too. Goro’s mom was staring at Ohya the same way Yuuki had once eyed his phone sitting innocent and unprotected on the attic table at Leblanc: as if the second he stopped looking, it would go missing, and in Ohya’s case Yuuki wasn’t sure they wanted to know where she would wind up snooping.

That had to be his nerves talking. His plan to spend the evening trying to decide whether to go through Ren’s room or not was thoroughly dashed, and while the guilt of doing it wouldn’t eat at him for the next few weeks, he was also disappointed he hadn’t gotten the chance to decide for himself.

Well, there was always tomorrow, before his train left. He could just go in and look around and pretend that it was Akira’s room, even if it was smaller and the bedspread was the wrong color and there was no trace of Akira, just the boy he used to be.

The Amamiya’s dining table wasn’t meant for five people, but with a spare chair Yuuki claimed for himself, they made it work. No one spoke a word of Ren or Goro or Ra Ciela while they were eating; no one spoke much at all, outside of asking for this dish or that or for someone to pass the salt or Ohya’s generous compliments as she heaped everything she could onto her plate.

It must be nice, being an adult whose stomach didn’t twist into knots at everything.

Yuuki called his dad while Mrs. Amamiya and Ms. Akechi washed up. Mr. Amamiya and Ohya stayed at the table, chatting softly enough about Ren and Ohya’s article that he could manage a short conversation. Hirotaka had done so much that it didn’t feel right keeping the truth from him anymore, even if it wasn’t believable. He deserved to know.

“Yuuki,” Hirotaka said, “this is a surprise. I thought you weren’t coming back until tomorrow.”

“I’m not—I mean, I am coming back tomorrow,” Yuuki said. Why was his throat suddenly so dry? “I just—is this a good time? Do you have time to talk right now?”

“I do,” was the reply.

“How much time?”

“How much do you need?”

“I don’t know,” he said. Hours. Days. Would he have to explain the wedding? _Could_ he explain the wedding? What in the world would the Amamiyas think? He didn’t want to throw up some abridged version and make everything confused, the way he had before with Takamaki. Ryuji and the others weren’t here to clean up after him this time.

He was on his own.

Hirotaka hummed and said, “That’s fine. Whatever you need to tell me, and however long it takes, I’m all ears.”

“Okay,” he said, setting the phone down and putting it on speakerphone. Ohya dragged out a mini tape recorder, asked if it was alright for her to record, and turned it on when he said she could.

When Mrs. Amamiya and Ms. Akechi rejoined them at the table, Yuuki began.

It was as easy as it had been with Takamaki, at first. The group of adults expressed the same revulsion Takamaki had in the same places, Ohya nodding in spots she could remember from her own app. It was easy because his friendship with Akira had been lighter, back then when he’d had another thousand or so people by his side, but it was hard to watch Ms. Akechi’s face as she gasped when Yuuki got to Goro’s part of the story. It was hard to watch Mrs. Amamiya reach out and take her hand and grip it tightly as the rest of it fell out of his mouth and onto the table, where Yuuki could swear the words stacked up until they spilled to the floor. His ears ached with a phantom pressure; his voice cracked and broke as he covered the elections and asking Akira if he had really been a boy named Ren Amamiya.

Ren’s father got up from the table then, and came back with glasses of water and a pitcher with more. Yuuki took his and sipped at it; Ms. Akechi dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.

He supposed it never got easier for her. Wishing for any kind of news about her son for a decade and then having to sit and hear, over and over, that he was dead to the world—it had to be hard.

Then he launched into the harder stuff. Ms. Akechi gradually went from weeping to staring in shock at the table as Yuuki described the things Goro had been willing to do to come home; Mr. Amamiya dragged his chair as close to his wife’s as it could get just so she could lean on him as Yuuki described Akira’s coronation and the subsequent evacuation of the planet. Ohya’s face went grim as he had to explain how Akira had turned Ra Ciela from a lush, loved homeland into a dense ball of energy only fit to power the Soreil’s engines.

He had to pause, then. Mrs. Amamiya, for the first time in hours, asked, “But he said he’d forgotten. How—how did he—”

“Dear,” said her husband, “let him think. Let him remember.”

And it was hard, watching hope briefly light in Ms. Akechi’s eyes as Yuuki explained how Goro sought out Ren on the Soreil, how he asked for a friend in the coming years as they searched for a way home—only to watch it flicker and die as Yuuki had to explain that Goro was willing to steal Akira’s body and the immense power of a planet, that Goro was willing to tear Akira’s mind to pieces just for having the audacity of resisting him, that Yuuki and Akira had struggled over three long years to piece it all back together—

And that, when they finally knew the whole of it, how Akira hadn’t wanted to wake up if it meant losing Yuuki, how he was content to live in a dream if it meant keeping the one he loved close by.

“We had this big fight about it,” Yuuki said, voice hoarse and fingers twisted in Ren’s necklace and slipped through the rings. “He didn’t want to be alone again—I get that—but he also said he wanted to come home, and I wanted him to come home, too, but there was nothing I could do except threaten him. I told him I’d never visit him again if he didn’t, and what good would it do him to keep on waiting for me when I wasn’t going to come back, and that I’d hate him if he didn’t at least _try_ , and—”

“And he did,” Ohya finished, and Yuuki nodded.

“He was everything to me. He still is. But if—if I just let him laze about in a dream world like that, we’d never get the chance to meet face to face, and I didn’t want a love like that—and, um, that wasn’t really the point of all this, but—”

“Goro had best come home soon,” Ms. Akechi said, when Yuuki’s voice failed him again and he had to take another drink, “because he’s far overdue for a spanking, I think.”

Mrs. Amamiya nodded. “And Ren is going to be grounded for month at _least_ while we try to find him some help to deal with all of… this. That’s why you wanted to tell us, isn’t it, Mishima? Because—because when they come home, they’re going to need help?”

Yuuki nodded. “I don’t know everything that happened to Goro, but Akira, he’d have these nightmares, sometimes. He would just start screaming in the middle of the night, begging not to be hurt or insisting that his name was Ren. He must have remembered something else without me knowing, but he never wanted to talk about it, and I—I just never asked. He seemed so happy toward the end of it, but I should have realized that he was pushing himself to act fine—I should have known—”

“That’s not your fault, Yuuki,” Hirotaka said.

“That’s right,” Mr. Amamiya agreed. “It’s the fault of whoever did that to him. Forgive me for a bit of morbidness, but I hope whoever it was is long dead by now.”

“It’s not that surprising that he’d act that way,” Ohya chimed in. “Lots of people do the same thing, and for plenty of different reasons. It makes sense that he’d want to spend a little more time with his husband, right?”

She had the nerve to wink at him as the Amamiyas and Ms. Akechi froze and stared at his hands. It had felt good to wear the damn rings as he got closer to the end of the story, but now he wasn’t so sure: Akira’s was pitch-black and contrasted nicely against his skin and t-shirt and there was no way he could pass it off as a trick of the light.

And he hadn’t explained it, hadn’t so much as touched on it, because how was he supposed to explain it all without involving Akira’s bridal kimono or the fact that Ryuji had bought the rings or the fact that Yuuki had been sleeping in Leblanc’s attic at the time?

“Married?” Hirotaka asked, sounding ten years older. “Yuuki, how—”

Yuuki jumped on the chance to explain: “It wasn’t _legal_ , not really—it was in his dream world, so we couldn’t really do anything, and I don’t even know if he’ll want to go through with it when he comes back. I just—I thought he’d like the extra incentive to, maybe, and it was nice to know that he loved me enough to want to marry me, and Mom had just kicked me out of the house when he proposed, so…”

“Yuuki,” his dad said. “When you get back we’re talking about this, understand?”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry, Yuuki. Now, I should go. It’s getting late.”

Whatever happened to ‘as long as you need?’ Yuuki wanted to ask, but didn’t. Hirotaka just needed time to process it all, he was sure.

He hoped he was sure.

“Well,” Ohya chirped once Yuuki’s phone was back in his pocket and her tape recorder was stowed away, “I’ll just take my leave, then. No doubt you’ve all got some more talking to do, and I don’t want to get in your hair any more than I already have—”

“Wait,” Mrs. Amamiya said, as Ohya tried to scuttle out of her spot. “Did you—did you know? Did he tell you?”

“Oh, well,” Ohya laughed, “it was just a guess, actually. I thought he’d say they were engaged, not that they’d already tied the knot. Congratulations, by the way, Yuuki.”

“It wasn’t legal,” Yuuki mumbled to the table.

He doubted anyone heard him; Ms. Akechi’s chair scraped back as she stood and said, “I should be getting home as well. I have quite a lot to think about, and I think I’ll need the quiet. Thank you very much for tonight.”

Yuuki kept still in his seat as the Amamiyas got up to see their guests out; even if he got up, where could he go? The bathroom? Would the Amamiyas believe that he needed to use the toilet that badly, and for however long it would take for all of—this, this embarrassment and relief and the pathetic feeling of keeping something so important bottled up just because it made him a nervous wreck to even think about—to wear off?

“Mishima,” one of them said, voice so low he couldn’t tell which one it was or if it was both of them or if it was Ren, somehow, Akira come back to him at last, “let’s take this off before you snap it, alright?”

Fingers came up to rest on his neck, undoing the clasp of the necklace. His neck felt colder without it. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“You have nothing to apologize for,” was the response. God, he hoped it was Akira. What would he do, if Akira came back and hated him? How could he live like that?

( _Could_ he live like that?)

“I—I just,” he said, trying to find the words. He didn’t want Akira to hate him. He didn’t want to explain keeping something as important as a wedding—even a fake, non-legal one—from the Amamiyas and his dad.

“We knew Ren wanted to marry you, dear,” said Mrs. Amamiya, somewhere on his right. She was holding his hand and rubbing circles into the back of it, the chain of the necklace slipping between them. “We didn’t think—well, we didn’t think he’d go through with it while he was still… there. Away from us.”

“Ren said a lot of things,” Mr. Amamiya said, “like how he wanted to change his name and become someone new once he came back. He said he had one in mind, but he wouldn’t tell us what it was.”

“We didn’t think he was serious about any of it until we found that sketchbook. Ren said there were more in his room, but that was the only one he wanted us to see, and…”

“Curiosity killed the cat, Mama,” Mr. Amamiya said.

“In my defense, he has a dozen other sketchbooks just like it!”

“And you’re—you’re okay with it?” Yuuki asked. “With—with him liking me?”

And not just Yuuki but other guys: Aizawa and Tsukimoto and Kashima, all there in his sketchbook as he puzzled himself out. He gave as much attention to the girls, and Yuuki still wasn’t sure whether he should be paranoid about that or not. Akira wasn’t even back yet; he had plenty of time to work himself up to being a nervous, avoidant wreck.

“He chose you,” Mrs. Amamiya said. “He chose you, and that’s all that matters, dear.”

“That’s right,” said her husband. “Ren chose you. If we tried to force him to love someone else, he’d hate us. He made that very clear. It wouldn’t be right of us to come in now and say it’s all wrong because, to him, anyone else will be wrong. When he needed someone by his side, you were the only one who stayed. That’s more than proof enough of how much you care for him, isn’t it?”

“Not everyone will agree, but they don’t matter, Mishima. Ren is our son, and—and he was always going to be this way. Loving you wouldn’t change that, and—and I think he’s chosen very well.”

But he wasn’t that special. Akira had just been a distraction at first, a way to forget that soon he would be in volleyball practice and under Kamoshida’s thumb for another day. A way to forget that, when he went home in the evening, his parents wouldn’t give two shits about him as long as they could flaunt his successes. A way to forget how lonely he was—but Akira had wanted him back. Akira had wanted him to stay. Akira had spent months putting together a bridal kimono he might never wear, all because Yuuki made him _want_ to.

And Yuuki had gone and kissed goddamn Yamada. He would never let himself live it down.

But he did let the Amamiyas hold him, their presences as calming as Akira’s had been, as calming as Yuuki imagined he would be once he was home again, safe and sound.

Well, now he knew where Akira got it from.

* * *

Futaba leaned back and stretched. On her monitor, Nishima’s dad’s phone positioned him right in the middle of his apartment, pacing back and forth before stopping—probably to take a seat—only to start up again, just as abruptly.

She shouldn’t be doing this. She shouldn’t be, but NPC had gone AWOL on her and that wasn’t cool, damn it, and nobody was answering their phone, so she’d done the next best thing and tapped it right in the middle of the unabridged version of Whatever Happened to Ren Amamiya, and she’d immediately gotten a bad feeling.

She didn’t know Hirotaka Mishima two hours ago. Now she knew everything aside from whatever the hell was going through his head right now—probably that he should call the police, or an institution, and get his son ‘help’—and she hoped he wouldn’t.

Wakaba, perched carefully on her bed, said, “So this is what Sojiro meant.”

“He’s not crazy.”

In her spare monitor, Wakaba barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes and sighed. “I suppose he can’t be, if this many people can vouch for his story. Can you find out who else was there?”

“But Mom, that’s illegal,” she gasped.

“And has that stopped you before?”

“Nope,” she said, and wished Nishima had said somebody’s name out loud—other than Akira’s, which didn’t count—so she could track it. She recognized the Amamiyas and Ms. Akechi, but not the last one.

She wasn’t going to sleep until she found out, was she?

Wakaba let her work for a while, digging through Nishima’s call history to find out if he’d dialed any new numbers—and he had, and from there it was easy to connect number to name to an actual person: Ichiko Ohya, currently renting a room at the Amamiya’s local inn, timeframe undetermined. She’d checked in months ago, paid in cash every day, and hadn’t done much of anything.

It made Futaba wonder what she was doing there, in Akira’s hometown. Scouting for sob story quotes? Looking for witnesses to question?

“You don’t do anything… _bad_ with this information, do you, Futaba?”

“Only if they deserve it, like Kana’s parents.”

“And you’re never tempted to?”

“I’d be just as bad as they are, if I did,” she said. She would lock people out of their phones or bank accounts if she felt they deserved it—let them sweat a little, or a lot, until the police got there—but use their money, their ID, their very selves and livelihoods like it was her own?

Never. She got rid of those rotting branches of Medjed almost as fast as they popped up. Futaba wouldn’t stand for it, not in _her_ infamous hacker group.

“It’s not that different from being a spy,” she said, and realized a little too late that spying was illegal. Wakaba pinched the bridge of her nose, glasses pushed up onto her forehead, and sighed again. She scrambled to explain. “I don’t—I don’t think that just because I can find it and look at it that it means I have to use it, okay? I don’t. My nerves wouldn’t be able to take it if I did, I just—like knowing things, especially when nobody tells me anything.”

It helped that eventually Nishima would tell her everything on his own, apologizing the whole time for not saying anything, maybe offering to take her to Akihabara as a treat to make it up to her—she hadn’t said yes yet, but there was a Featherman event coming up soon she wanted to go to, and Nishima would be a kind-of-sort-of good buffer against the crowd.

She took a breath. “Like how you haven’t told me how your house hunt is going.”

Wakaba winced. “Futaba, I haven’t really had the chance to go looking.”

“Is that because you haven’t had the time, or because you don’t want to, or because of something else? Is—is it me? Are you making yourself be happy here because you know I am? I thought you liked being independent, and that means living on your own, right?”

Because Wakaba, months fresh off a plane from America where her apartment was bigger than Sojiro’s house and cost more than he made in a year, couldn’t be happy here. Not in Sojiro’s guest room, not in Sojiro’s house, not in a place where she couldn’t leave her research scattered all over the floor for her daughter to trip over. Not in a place where research wasn’t the most important thing in the world.

“Futaba, I…” her mom started, then stopped.

That was fine. Futaba dug up more info on Ohya while she waited, kept tabs on Nishima’s dad as he kept pacing around his apartment, and wondered if Nishima would be angry with her for listening in some more, since his phone hadn’t moved at all in the last twenty minutes.

He would probably be angry. Lots of people would be, she thought, and they’d be right to be, the same way Kana had been angry when Futaba got a glimpse of her diary.

(Why she’d been toting it around with her, bringing it to school of all places—Futaba could guess. She was surprised they even let her have a phone, until she thought a bit harder about that.)

“I _have_ been busy,” her mom finally finished. “Work is just as busy now that we’re getting ready to publish our findings as it was when we were researching, and Sojiro did say he didn’t mind if I stayed as long as I needed to, and you do like it here… And I don’t want to pull you from this, from Sojiro. He takes care of you, gives you better care than I could, and you trust him.”

 _More than me_ , her mom didn’t say. _You trust him more than you trust me_ , and that was true, Futaba did. If Wakaba had been around when things got bad maybe Futaba would have called her, but she hadn’t, and the voices in her head told her it was because she wasn’t wanted, wasn’t needed, was just a burden and a drain and a waste of her mother’s potential.

Sojiro had run back here from the cafe when she called. Sojiro had broken his promise and rammed her door down. Sojiro had held her when Wakaba hadn’t after the assassination attempt.

“Do you hate that I trust him more?” Futaba asked.

“I hate myself, for not trying to earn it before now.”

Oh, God. Her mom was crying. Futaba had no idea what to do when someone else cried—not even Yuuki’s fight with Akira had made her an expert in it, and the most she had let him do was wipe snot in her hair, anyway—but the answer had to be something other than sit there like a lump.

Sojiro had held her. Yuuki hugged his dad. It was—it was normal, right?

Normal. Right.

As if Futaba was normal.

But she could try this, couldn’t she? She could try and be better than her mom for once; she could try and give what she had always wanted, and maybe Wakaba would understand.

Or maybe not. It could go either way.

Futaba took off her glasses, folded them neat and left them by her mouse where she could find them, then turned to the bed. It was a blur of light sheets and her mom’s dark clothing and the wall behind her, but it was enough for Futaba to make her way over without falling flat on her ass. She shoved her hands roughly around where the Wakaba-shaped blur was, hit her mom’s arm, and endured Wakaba’s gasp of surprise.

“Futaba, what—”

“It’s called a hug. You should look it up sometime.”

Wakaba—inexplicably, because Futaba hadn’t even known it was a scent—smelled like paper and cheap printer ink and faintly of grilled chicken that was probably in the salad she ate for lunch sometimes, when she didn’t have time to prepare anything else.

“I love you,” Futaba said, as her cheek pressed into Wakaba’s sweater. She always wore sweaters; maybe the lab was always cold. “I love you, but that doesn’t mean I have to trust you, and I don’t have to trust you to love you. It’s—it’s important to get as much data as possible, right, which means I can’t always use one source, and external perspectives are just as important as internal ones—”

She broke off with a sniff. Wakaba stroked her hair and said, “That’s a terrible analogy.”

“I’m not good at coming up with stuff on the fly!”

“But you love me.”

“Yeah,” Futaba said, deciding she’d missed hugs. Maybe Nishima would give her some when he got back. Maybe they could do that instead of go to Akihabara.

“Even if you don’t trust me.”

“Yeah.”

Wakaba laughed, a noiseless thing that started in her chest but never got anywhere. “Do you love Sojiro?”

“That’s different. He’s like—he’s like the Beku Tree in Legend of Hilda, he’s the all-knowing father-figure. It’d be hard not to love him, but it’s different from the way I love you.”

Or maybe it wasn’t. If Sojiro went away for years and she barely heard anything from him until he got back, she’d be just as excited to see him as she had to see her mom again. Wakaba was her mom, and of course Futaba loved her, but Sojiro—Sojiro wasn’t really her dad. He was just her guardian. He just took care of her.

It was more than Wakaba had done, so why—why should her love for them be different? Why did she have to explain that it was different?

Why did she have to say anything at all?

“Futaba, do you—do you like it here? All three of us, living together like this?”

With Wakaba and Sojiro in the same house—it was almost like they were family. Futaba had dreams where they were, and she always woke up crying, wishing it could be true; but Sojiro and Wakaba shouldn’t have to get married to make her happy. Wakaba and Sojiro just had to stay here, with her, and she’d be happy.

“Yeah,” she said.

“And—do you like living in Yongen?”

With Leblanc down the street, where her friends could find her anytime they wanted? With the nice second-hand shop guy at the corner who let her gush over his new-old electronics? With the couple who owned the movie theater by the grocers showing old scifi flicks every other weekend, and the lady in the grocers who knew her by name? How could Futaba hate living here, where no one called her a freak?

How could she hate living here, when it felt more like home than her old apartment had?

“Yeah, she said.

“I see,” Wakaba said. “That’s good, then. I like it here, too.”

“You do?”

“I do. It has two of my most favorite people in it; why wouldn’t I like it?”

Because it was dingy and cramped and situated in a back alley, that was why; but if Wakaba said she liked it, then that meant she liked it, and that was all Futaba wanted.

She held her tighter. It felt an awful lot like coming home.


	18. Summer Vacation, The Second Wednesday

Wakaba joined him in making breakfast. This wasn’t new by this point—she would help out and make herself a lunch at the same time, usually through Sojiro’s tutoring—but what new was that she asked, “Is it really alright for me to keep living here?”

“I already said it was,” he told her, and flipped the eggs.

She hummed and kept slicing. After a while, she said, “I just—it just seems strange to me, that you’d be so accepting of another person in your house. I can’t understand it.”

“I’m not about to kick you out before you’ve got another place to stay, Wakaba.”

“I’m not sure I want another place to stay. I told Futaba I like it here. It’s everything I thought marriage would be, before… well, before.”

Before her fiance or husband or whatever he was died, but— “I don’t want to be a replacement for your husband, Wakaba. Not anymore.”

“I never said you had to be,” she said. Maybe it was the noise from the stove, but her tone sounded… hurt? Scandalized? As if he’d somehow insulted her by saying she was looking for a replacement. “And I never said I was looking for one, did I?”

“You didn’t,” he said.

“I just—maybe I don’t want to be alone anymore. The apartment was always so—so empty, before I left, and even when I was in America, the place I had there didn’t feel like a home. This place, it feels like a home, Sojiro.”

He sighed. “What do you want, Wakaba?”

She laughed and wiped tears from her eyes. “I don’t really know, Sojiro.”

He didn’t quite know, either, but if all she wanted was to not be alone anymore, then the solution was simple. “You could always try dating again. Not—not me, I don’t mean me, but—other people. Ones who’ll make you happy.”

“Do you really think just anyone can make me happy?”

“No. But that’s why dating’s a gamble, isn’t it? You can try your hardest and it won’t work out, sometimes.” The toast popped. “But you’ll find someone. You draw people to you, Wakaba, and I know the men won’t be able to resist.”

“Like you weren’t able to resist, you mean.”

That earned her a wry smile. “Exactly.” No need to mention all of his awkward attempts to woo her: the handmade lunches, babysitting Futaba despite not understanding a single thing about children, flowers on her desk on her birthday and at Christmas. No need to mention how nearly all of his thoughts were occupied with his job and her, up until the assassination attempt and her flight from the country.

It was Futaba that had changed his mind, made him lose that love. Futaba and her small hands and her teary eyes and the way she curled up small in the backseat of his car on the way home from the airport as she pretended not to cry. Futaba and her small voice over the phone asking him if he wanted her to die—not if her mother wanted her to, but _him_ , Sojiro—and how she held his hand at the hospital, when the nurses finally let him see her.

Wakaba might not be good for him anymore, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t be good for anyone else. That didn’t mean she had to stop in place and forget that she was a person with feelings that moved on whether she wanted them to or not.

“But, ah, only if you’re ready,” he added.

She smiled and laughed. “We’ll see,” she said.

It was better than nothing, he thought. It was better than being outright lied to, and better than hearing her say that she would never be over her dead love.

It was Wakaba, after all, and like Futaba she deserved to be happy.

That was all he could ask for.

* * *

Yuuki spent most of the morning going through Ren’s room.

The Amamiyas stood by and let him, quoting a few parenting tips that it was best to let Ren tell them what he wanted when he was ready rather than find out by snooping through his things. Yuuki, they said, would be an exception.

Yuuki was pretty sure they wanted to help him feel better by looking through the rest of Ren’s sketchbooks. Yuuki thought that to be a rather bad idea, as he found out when he flipped one open at random and promptly slammed it closed. He shoved the whole pile under Ren’s bed where he wouldn’t have to look at it and waited until he calmed down to go through everything else.

Ren was a very good artist. Yuuki didn’t think the material was age-appropriate, forgetting that he, too, had been fifteen and hormonal.

(Yuuki was not going to let Akira live down the fact that his questioning, fifteen-year-old self had drawn very detailed, if not very good softcore porn. Not a chance in hell.)

Yuuki did take the chance to flip through a binder of gymnastics routines and Ren’s weekly workouts when he wasn’t in practice and his usual warm-ups. Ren took gymnastics pretty seriously for a guy who only started so he’d be flexible enough to keep helping people; took it more seriously than Yuuki had volleyball, at least, with his charts and procedures of stretches and the varying jogging trails around town.

Ren stuffed receipts in a drawer in his desk, and kept a logbook of his bank account nearby. Yuuki wondered what he’d been saving for: a move to a different town? College abroad? A gaming system? Games for the system he already had, hooked up to a TV in the corner but used only to play DVDs?

Yuuki took a look at the spines—overdue rentals from someplace in town, with titles like _Finding Yourself:_ _A Guide to Inner Peace_ and _Five Dances_ and _Boy Meets Girl—_ and could almost see Ren curled up on his bed, watching them in the middle of the night.

It was just another thing that Akira had never mentioned—or maybe by then he had decided it didn’t matter, without a small town nipping at his heels for everything he did or said—and that was the biggest difference between Ren and Akira, that Ren was struggling to find himself and Akira wasn’t.

Akira knew who he was and didn’t need books from the library walking him through how he felt about himself. Akira knew who he loved and didn’t need the same books to tell him it was okay; that was Ren. Lonely Ren with his sketchbooks filled with a love that he never thought he’d receive; scared Ren with his drawings marred by tears as he noted in the margins that maybe something was wrong with him after all, that maybe he was broken somehow, to find appeal in everyone around him, that maybe there was something wrong with him or his mind or his brain, to think that way.

He never said it outright. Yuuki wished he had but knew the labels were the worst part of it all, that it gave everyone else something to shove in his face at every encounter, as if he hadn’t spent months or years agonizing over it.

Then Yuuki ate an early lunch with the Amamiyas before they saw him off at the station. Mrs. Amamiya gave him a hug that lasted nearly three minutes; Mr. Amamiya gave him a handshake and met his eyes and Yuuki swore he saw some kind of question in their depths, but didn’t ask. It was probably something dumb, like _Can you still love Ren, after what you’ve seen?_

The answer was yes. It would always be yes.

They waited on the platform until the train was out of sight, and only then did Yuuki slump in his seat. He closed his eyes for a few minutes—blissful darkness, the only noise the thrum of the train under his feet, the only thing swirling through his brain the knowledge that he was going home to talk with his dad. Hirotaka couldn’t be angry at him, could he? And—and if he was angry, how angry could he be?

Not very angry, Yuuki hoped, and tugged his phone out of his pocket. He shoved earbuds in, put on one of Akira’s videos, and flipped through Ren’s sketchbook some more.

He really, really hoped Hirotaka wasn’t angry.

He really, really hoped Futaba wasn’t angry, either. He was ignoring her messages—he’d been ignoring her for days, now, too caught up in his own problems to really spend any time with her the way he knew she wanted. She’d had that friend of hers over for a few days, but Yuuki got the feeling she wasn’t into the same things Futaba was, and there was no way it had been an enjoyable visit.

She hadn’t even gone to the beach. Futaba had to be more than a little disappointed.

… He should have bought some souvenirs.

He’d have to ask her when her vacation was over, and make it up to her by then.

In the meantime, he had Akira and a bunch of summer homework to finish, even if the thought of summer homework made him want to curl up in a ball and cry—naturally he’d left math for last. Maybe Futaba would help him with it, and he’d let her laugh at him as he struggled to identify derivatives or cosines or whatever the hell his homework was about.

He wasn’t expecting his dad to be waiting for him at the station. Yuuki couldn’t think of anything to say, standing there with his luggage as people flowed all around them.

“Let’s get some lunch,” Hirotaka said, and despite the train bento he’d had on his way, Yuuki complied. Hirotaka wouldn’t make a scene in a restaurant; he was a grown man who should know how to control himself, and the embarrassment of politely being asked to leave for yelling should be enough of a deterrent—but it wouldn’t stop the looks, though. The _I thought you could do better_ looks, the _I’m disappointed in the way you’ve been behaving_ looks.

It was only when they stopped at a familiar station that Yuuki snapped out of his stupor. “Dad, where are we going?”

“Leblanc,” Hirotaka said.

“Uh, okay. Why?” If it was the curry, Yuuki had plenty of it in his fridge. Maybe it was the coffee, then; Hirotaka had seemed to like the fare Boss brewed up for him, and adults did like their coffee.

“I’m not sure of the exact reason,” his dad said, “but that was where you went when your mother kicked you out, wasn’t it? That means it’s special to you, and I want you to be comfortable when we talk. I’m not going to yell at you, Yuuki, but…” He sighed.

“You’re mad at me,” Yuuki guessed.

“I’m mad at myself, for not seeing this coming.”

Yuuki waited for anything more, but Hirotaka went silent, almost contemplative, as they neared Leblanc and stepped inside. Boss looked up from his crossword puzzle and raised a brow.

“Hello, Mr. Sakura,” Hirotaka said. “It’s been a while. Forgive me for leaving so suddenly last time.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem,” Boss said, shooting Yuuki a look that clearly asked what the hell was going on. Yuuki shrugged, because despite the long explanation of who Akira really was and how they’d really met, he wasn’t quite sure what Hirotaka wanted to talk to him about. It couldn’t be internet safety, not anymore.

Boss cleared his throat and asked, “So, uh, what brings you here today?”

“Dinner, actually,” Hirotaka said.

“Dinner, huh,” Boss replied, letting his puzzle book flop closed as he moved back behind the counter. “Two specials?”

“Yes, please.”

“Coming right up.”

They chose the booth in the back nearest the TV with its captions running across the screen; Yuuki watched them as Hirotaka fiddled with the sugar packets and the napkin holder and the disposable chopsticks, stopped long enough to fold his hands together and look like a responsible adult, then started tapping a finger.

His dad was nervous. Yuuki never thought he’d see the day.

“You know you mean a lot to me, Yuuki,” Hirotaka said at last, as Boss started up the coffee brewers. “I know I haven’t shown it as well as I could have—as well as I _should_ have. All that business with your school and that coach and you never said a word. It should have been obvious that you didn’t trust adults anymore. Anyone with half a mind could have seen that.”

“That’s not your fault,” Yuuki said.

Hirotaka shook his head. “I’m your father, but you couldn’t come to me. That coach of yours was hurting you, and I had no idea. It makes sense that you’d find comfort in a friend, rather than your own family, and I’m glad that you did. You helped that boy. You saw someone like yourself and you helped him. That’s admirable.”

Admirable wasn’t the word Yuuki would use. Desperate and lonely were closer.

“I can’t even be angry that you hid the truth, either. No one would have believed a story like that, least of all an old man like myself. It goes beyond comprehension, I think. It’s the kind of story you have to believe is real without any proof; maybe that’s why it’s such a hard one to swallow, that people could do that to a child.”

Take him far from his home and subject him to unimaginable horrors and still have the nerve to say, _Save us. Only you can do it._

Yuuki knew exactly where the nerve came from, though.

“People do bad things all the time,” Yuuki said. Kamoshida and Madarame and that mafia boss making money by blackmailing high schoolers and Yuuki, too, forcing himself on Yamada like he wasn’t already dating Akira.

“Yes, I know,” Hirotaka said, and Boss plopped down plates and cups of coffee before he could say anymore.

“You told him?” Boss asked Yuuki.

“And the Amamiyas and Goro’s mom,” Yuuki said, “and a reporter.”

“A reporter, huh,” Boss said. “You sure about that?”

He wasn’t. Not really, not totally; Ohya could have gotten her info from anyone who’d kept the app that long, could have been following the posts on his forum and managed to put two and two together, or she could have just guessed and gotten lucky.

But that cult website looked too real and had too many users to be fake.

“She said there’s a cult of people who want to be taken to Ra Ciela,” he said. “They have no idea how bad it really is there, Boss. I—I had to say something. I didn’t want other families to be torn apart like Akira’s was.”

“Kids like them watch too much damn anime,” Boss said to that, then sighed and shook his head. “Well, as long as you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said.

Boss went back to his puzzle book; Hirotaka took a drink of his coffee. “A cult?” he asked.

“That’s kind of what it looked like to me,” Yuuki said.

Hirotaka hummed and ate. Yuuki picked at his food and wished he hadn’t eaten that bento on the train just so his dad wouldn’t be staring at him from across the table.

“Does he make you happy, Yuuki? That Akira boy,” Hirotaka finally asked.

“Yeah,” Yuuki said.

He hummed, ate some more, and said, “And you’ll tell me next time, when you want to make it legal?”

“You’d want to know that?”

What if he changed his mind? What if he decided, years later, that a son who wouldn’t marry a girl and give him grandchildren was too much of a burden or too shameful to keep around? What if he just didn’t like Akira, and thought Yuuki could do better?

“Of course I’m sure,” Hirotaka stated. “Now, tell me about your trip.”

There wasn’t much to say about the trip, but Yuuki forgot to finish his plate as he talked. Even Boss angled himself in his seat to hear better as Yuuki described the small town Ren Amamiya had haunted like a ghost until he disappeared and then even after he was gone, his face staring out from hundreds or thousands of posters. As if now that he was gone he had worth; as if now that he was gone, he was suddenly someone the town couldn’t live without.

Boss mumbled something about money-grubbing shop owners taking advantage of a fad but didn’t say much more. Hirotaka only looked sad throughout the whole little speech, in a way that Yuuki realized he couldn’t help. His face had looked like that for years, and Yuuki was only just now noticing.

Yuuki was only just noticing a lot of things, it seemed.

Since it felt like he was the only one talking, he asked Hirotaka how his job was, and how his mom was, and whether anything had gotten better or worse. Hirotaka only smiled—sadly, in a way that didn’t quite reach his eyes—and said everything was fine.

That was an adult answer, Yuuki thought as Hirotaka paid. It was exactly the kind of thing Yuuki would have said two or three years ago, if someone asked him whether his life was in shambles and in danger of falling to pieces all around him: that he was fine and it was fine, even if he scoured the tops of buildings wondering if they were tall enough and whether it would hurt.

“When you want to talk about it,” he said as he hugged his dad goodbye, “I’ll listen.”

Just listen, the way he had before with Akira. Listening was easy.

Talking was the hard part.

“Alright,” Hirotaka said and left. Yuuki sat back down in the booth, wondering when he’d started to care about his parents and their lives and the way he’d ruined it all.

The bell jingled—and it wasn’t Hirotaka, coming back for some reason or another; Segawa stared around the shop and breathed deep and Yuuki swore she was drooling.

 _Great_ , he thought.

“Oh, it’s Mishima,” she said, bounding over before Boss could help her. “I didn’t know you knew this place! Do you come here often? What do you recommend?”

“The special,” he muttered to his plate.

“The special,” she echoed, turning to the menu and scanning it for the price. Her shoulders slumped when she saw it was an eight-hundred-yen meal.

“Just the curry’s three,” Boss said, waiting on the other side of the counter.

“Three hundred,” Segawa said to herself, turning back around to Yuuki’s table and his plate. The longer she stood there staring, the more she seemed to want to eat, until she turned back around and said, “Just the curry!”

And, without asking, took Hirotaka’s spot.

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “Yamada said you were sick but still made yourself go to the mixer. You shouldn’t do that, you know; it’s bad for you!”

“I just don’t like crowds,” Yuuki said, figuring it was the easiest explanation he could give. Crowds, strangers—there wasn’t much difference there.

“Really? I think it’s nice getting lost in a big crowd, but Yamamoto says that’s odd.”

“Not to some people.” Yusuke would understand where she was coming from. He liked people watching so much he would wander into employee-only areas without much thought for the consequences.

“It’d be nice if I could find a guy who likes that,” she said. “We could get lost together; and I can’t believe I’ve never been here before! I love little shops like this!”

“Ones that serve weird food?”

“No, it’s—homey. Not like a chain store where the floor’s always waxed and everything’s bright and shiny and they put a time limit on how long you can spend there.” She kicked her feet under the table, smiling all the while, and Yuuki wondered how she was a college student.

Then he wondered how he was a college student, when two or three years ago he was contemplating jumping off a building.

“Plus nobody from school will be here,” she added. “I can come and eat and not have to listen to gossip. Gossip’s the worst; that’s why I told Yamamoto I won’t go to another mixer.”

“You won’t?”

She shook her head, smile drooping.

“Everybody gossips, though.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to sit there and listen to it,” she said. “Everybody seemed so nice, I thought we were getting along, and then Yamamoto said—”

Did he want to know, or could he guess? Yamamoto had been the one to make Yamada leave with him, after all. She could have said anything she wanted when they were gone—and Yusuke would have heard it, would have heard as everyone laughed or was disgusted.

The only question was whether he agreed or not.

“—well, it was mean. I think so, anyway, and so did some of the others, and when Kitagawa left because he was worried about you, she said something even meaner, and everything just got worse.”

In other words, it was his fault the mixer was awful. If he hadn’t gone, Segawa could be busy dating guys who potentially enjoyed getting lost in crowds—like Yusuke. She could be dating Yusuke.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s Yamamoto’s fault, not yours,” Segawa said. “You were sick, anyway. Saying that kind of thing about someone who’s sick—that’s just not right. Kitagawa even said you were puking in an alley! The nerve of some people!”

Boss came by and set down her plate. Segawa, starry-eyed at the promise of actual, real curry, made a noise that could have been a quick thanks for the meal and dug in.

If she was to be believed, Yamada had told everyone Yuuki was sick and pushing himself and that was why he had to go home early. Yuuki kind of remembered that, and kind of remembered Yamamoto’s—and the rest of the girl’s, actually, even if he couldn’t remember whether Segawa had agreed as well—very insistent order to take Yuuki home, because they were worried, too.

But that was a lie, wasn’t it? They hadn’t been worried, they only acted like it, and as soon as he and Yamada left the truth came out.

He wondered what it was for five seconds before realizing these were college girls. They must have had tons of ideas, and he could guess some of them, not that he wanted to.

“And if what Yamamoto said was true,” he asked, “what would you do?”

She paused in her chewing. “If it was true,” she said through a mouthful of curry, “why did Kitagawa say you were throwing up? Why would he stick up for you if it was all a lie?”

Because he was trying to be a good friend, despite not being able to stomach gay people. Because he didn’t want others talking about his friend like that.

(Were they still friends? Could they still be friends?)

“I don’t know,” he said.

“ _Did_ something happen?”

The kiss. The kiss that Yusuke saw; the damn kiss that drove him away—but if he mentioned that, he’d be outing Yamada and admitting to cheating in front of Boss in one fell swoop. Yuuki could already hear the lecture. He could already hear the sound of Yamada’s future going up in flames.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t say a word about it.

“It was just really gross, puking in an alley,” he lied. “There was this smell—”

Had there been a smell? The only thing he could remember was the mint on Yamada’s breath.

“—and it just made it worse, you know? Yamada practically dragged me to the station after. I called a friend of mine to pick me up so he could go home and change his socks.”

Had Yamada been wearing socks? Did it even matter at this point?

Segawa bought it, nodding and going back to her curry as if all was right with the world. Boss, though, scratched at his goatee and eyed them over the counter; maybe he smelled the lie, and Yuuki would never get out of the lecture no matter what he did.

Maybe he wanted just one person to tell him he was awful, that he shouldn’t have done it no matter what the reason, that he was just as bad as Kamoshida for taking what he wanted and expecting to get away with it.

And he was, wasn’t he? A kiss might be just a kiss, but Akira—it wasn’t fair to Akira. Yuuki spit in the face of their relationship, all on the chance that a kiss would drive Yamada away.

It hadn’t worked, and now he just felt like shit.

(Why had he done it, again? Because Yamada was scary? Was he still so weak to cower from a bunch of not-so-friendly advances?)

“But I am glad you’re feeling better,” Segawa said, once her curry was done. She stretched her arms over her head, working the kinks out of her back. “Maybe we can meet up and talk again sometime. You seem like a nice guy; definitely better than all those other ones.”

Boss snorted.

“I’m, uh, kind of taken,” Yuuki explained, fingers hook through his rings. Mrs. Amamiya was right: one of these days he was going to snap the necklace in half with all of his tugging.

“We can’t be friends if you’re taken?”

Friends. “Just friends?” he asked, just to be sure.

“Yeah,” she said with a grin. “My type’s blond and tanned. Probably foreign. Sorry, Mishima.”

Boss snorted again. He was—he was _laughing_ as Yuuki struggled to imagine a good Japanese girl who found blond foreigners hot enough to date.

Takamaki was an exception.

“You barely know me,” Yuuki said, stalling.

“Yeah, that’s kind of how friendships start, Mishima. Two people barely know each other—then they do, because they’re friends!”

Boss really _was_ laughing, shoulders shaking, puzzle book forgotten. Yuuki hoped this was the most he laughed in a long while even as he grasped at straws that would put all of this into perspective—or better yet, make it stop.

Segawa—she didn’t pout, not exactly, but Yuuki couldn’t place the expression on her face any other way—pouted, saying, “You don’t want to, do you?”

“No!” he said on reflex, but damn him if he was going to disappoint anyone right in front of him. “No, I do—I just, uh, I’m not used to it. People asking to be my friend, that is.”

(People asking to be his friend when what they really wanted was to take advantage of him somehow. Kamoshida, on that first day of practice, had practically purred, “I don’t want to be just your coach. I want to be your friend, and together we’ll go all the way to nationals.”

Yuuki had walked out of that practice with so many new bruises and aching muscles he’d cried just trying to get out of bed the next morning. He’d contemplated calling in sick before he realized that Kamoshida would just make practice worse for them all when he went back, and there was no way Yuuki could drop out of school because of a sport. His parents wouldn’t have understood, not one bit.)

Segawa beamed at him, bowed over the table, and said, “Then I hope we can be good friends, Mishima!”

“Oh, uh, sure,” he said.

Even if he wasn’t completely sure if it was a good idea or not, he was… tired, of hiding and running and trying to understand everyone around him, of ducking his head and pretending he wasn’t hurting when he was, even of thinking of excuses or reasons that he was the way he was.

He just was, and that was all.

And Segawa was a nice enough person, and if there were fangs behind her smile—well, at least he’d given her a shot first.

That was what Akira would want him to do.

* * *

Yusuke supposed he had one thing to thank Akira for, when he finally returned: he could paint again, and without the violent shaking that had, at first, spilled his brushes and palettes to the floor. Looking at his canvases no longer made dread well up in his stomach; the smell of paint no longer made him want to vomit, and he could breathe in his small bedroom even with the door closed and the window propped open.

(Or perhaps it was _Desire_ , sitting innocent and malicious against his wall. Nakanohara had taken one look and shuddered, a question passing over his face.

Yusuke was quite well, actually. _Desire_ was only as ugly as his own heart, after all, and it wasn’t made to be sold and stared at by the masses.

Just Yusuke. Only Yusuke.)

He set his brushes down to dry by the sink in the bathroom. Despite the ease with which he had managed to paint, his heart was still heavy, burdened by the things he’d said and done and seen; life with Madarame had never been easy, but Yusuke almost desired it over the half-thing he was living now.

… He was being dramatic again, wasn’t he. Anything outside of living in a cardboard box on the streets would be preferable to being Madarame’s pupil again, and that included this—this odd state of being he was in, heartbroken and unhappy and lashing out at some of the only few people who cared, his only refuge an app on his phone and an ugly painting on his wall.

This solitude was what he had craved for months, and now that he finally had it he wished he didn’t.

Well, it would blow over in a few weeks, hopefully. He would have the words to properly apologize by then, and surely Ryuji wouldn’t be as angry then, and the sight of Yuuki’s face would no longer be enough to drive Yusuke to a despair so deep that the simple act of breathing left him dizzy and sick. Futaba he couldn’t be sure about; she was replying to his messages but had stopped trying to get him to visit, and he feared that Ryuji had gotten to her first.

It was no matter, he thought. He would let it all simmer down and explain himself later.

For now, Akira was—

Not waiting by the desk Yusuke had last saved at, where he usually was. Akira could complain all he liked about not enjoying the sleep pods available for general use, but it was better than sleeping on the ground and having no one to talk to while Yusuke steered his friends through a visit to another planet and filled his sketchbook with the raven-winged, horned people of the Aru tribe.

Perhaps he was hungry. Yusuke had been gone for quite a while this time, and Akira had mentioned wanting to borrow Ren’s kitchen to cook himself meals, and as he moved the robot through the crowd on his screen Yusuke grabbed a can of potato sticks off the precarious tower on his shelf, peeled back the seal, and began eating.

There was a noticeable crowd outside of Ren’s shop, the low din of muttering almost drowning out the shouting from inside. There were former PLASMA guards at the door, and one of them recognized the robot. _“Sheesh, where’ve you been?”_ he asked. _“They’ve been at it for an hour now. Think you can do something about it?”_

He wasn’t entirely sure, but **I can try.**

The guard grinned, gave a crisp salute—Yusuke’s fingers itched for his pencil at the disparity between the hardened soldier and the youth he might have become, had all of this never occurred—and knocked. It was enough to startle the argument into temporary silence; Yusuke took the chance to enter the restaurant, leaving the crowd and its chorus of _But when is Ren going to open?_ behind.

Yusuke could not believe there were people willing to eat some of the concoctions Ren tried to dub food. He could not believe there were people willing to eat it even if it came with the Emperor’s seal of approval—of course the Emperor liked it, he made every dish himself—or while their very lives were in danger, and he could not believe people came here and endured the fare just for a smile of Ren’s and a quick, carefree chat while they choked it down.

 _“_ _Finally,”_ Ren grumbled from across the bar. Akira stood on the other side, arms crossed and the absurd baubles hanging from his sash jingling as his foot tapped.

 _“_ _He has nothing to do with this,”_ Akira said.

_“_ _Sure he does! He’s going to help you leave. Right?”_

_“_ _Sure he is,”_ Akira said, without waiting for Yusuke’s input. _“And then you can have this body of yours back. I never wanted it in the first place.”_

Ren grit his teeth. _“I told you I don’t want it back. I’m used to this one now;_ you _can have that one until it dies of old age!”_

_“_ _I never wanted it in the first place!”_

_“_ _Neither did I! Did you—do you think it’s all fun and games, being the Emperor’s son? Being the crown prince but knowing no one looks up to you because you just can’t compare to your dad?_ Do _you?”_

 _“_ _No one looked up to you because you never_ tried _to be good enough! Of course no one will take you seriously if you’re always goofing off—”_

_“That palace was just a gilded cage—”_

_“_ _—and fooling around; it’s no wonder they wanted a replacement! Kanon would have won that Succession by a landslide! No, anyone else would have, because they cared more than you did!”_

Ren went quiet with rage. A tear slipped down his cheek. _“I know I didn’t,”_ he managed to say. _“I was a stupid, spoiled prince who didn’t deserve the good people around me trying to get me to change, and I paid for it. Didn’t I pay for it? Forced out of my body—forced to watch you trounce around in it—forced to make something of myself from nothing—and I hated you for it. You had everything I took for granted and the only thing you wanted was to help everyone so you could go home, and I hated you for it!”_

Akira sighed the long-suffering sigh of someone desperate for the other party to understand what they meant and failing. _“I’ve already said that I don’t care about that. I never did; you were my friend and you still are, no matter how you felt about me. This was your body, and it_ _can_ _be again.”_

 _Oh_ , Yusuke thought. Akira was only trying to give back what he’d unknowingly stolen; Ren was only trying assure him that it wasn’t needed even if it could be returned.

 **You’re good friends** , he picked as Ren’s mouth opened to argue some more.

 _“_ _Tell me your robot’s joking,”_ Ren said.

 _“_ _He’s a smart robot,”_ Akira defended. _“He gets it, even if you don’t. That’s why I—”_

 **You both want what’s best for the other** , Yusuke interrupted. **But you need to understand that it might not be what he wants.**

Ren liked his new body; he was used to it, the way Yusuke had once ached for the good brushes Madarame insisted on buying after he was forced to use the lesser, cheaper ones. It wasn’t the same and it never would be, but Yusuke could still produce art even with cheap materials, and Ren could still live even with a Sharl body.

Akira, upstanding young lad that he was, was likely more than a little uncomfortable knowing that. Ren only had his new body because Akira had been forced to take the first, and Akira couldn’t give it back, could never give it back.

 _“_ _Exactly,”_ Ren said, grinning. _“I don’t want that body back. Don’t need it, even; it doesn’t have the Imperial Vocal Chords, and I can’t be Emperor without them. Besides, you’ll need it if you’re going to stay.”_

Akira stiffened. He clasped his hands at his heart as if it ached. _“I told you I want to go home,”_ he said softly. _“Goro and I, we don’t belong here, and we have family waiting for us.”_

Ren groaned, running a hand through his hair. He glanced at the robot—a plea for help if Yusuke ever saw one—crossed his arms, uncrossed them, then ran another hand through his hair. No wonder it was always so messy, if he played with it so much.

Akira, spurred on by the silence, went on, _“You’re the Emperor. If you asked them to, the people would sing a Song to send us home. I know they would. After—after everything we’ve done, don’t we deserve that?”_

 _“_ _A Song like that would kill them, and you know it,”_ Ren said. Akira winced; was that what they’d been fighting abut before? How to send Akira and Goro home? _“The energy requirements would be astounding; the only reason it worked before was because we had ten—no, a hundred—times the amount of people, and we could draw a bit of energy from each through the Cielnotrons they were Chained to, so the most they suffered was a bit of fatigue. No.”_

_“I can’t accept that as an answer.”_

_“_ _The answer’s still no! You’re not going to ask them to do it yourself, either, or you would have done it by now! Just learn to be happy here!”_

Akira’s face twisted. It was more than upset—the deep frown, lips curled back to bare teeth, his eyes nearly shut as he fought back tears—but the most he got out was _“You—”_ before Yusuke snatched him up into the crook of the robot’s arm and fled the restaurant. The crowd outside gave a collective gasp as the door slammed open—the friendly guard jumped back to avoid it, but it hit his companion square in the back, sending him sprawling—and hurried to make space as Yusuke forced the robot through.

They stared, and whispered, and speculated. Akira clung to the robot with a grip that would have strangled a normal human, and Yusuke heard the muffled sobs that made their way up his throat.

However long he had been at this—whether it was two years or five or ten—it had been too long. Yusuke only hoped he wasn’t too late to fix whatever damage had been done.

But not in town, where anyone could wander in completely unaware. And not in the Residential District, where the beds Akira favored were, because people _did_ still live there despite then danger. There were belongings in boxes scattered around those rooms, and Yusuke didn’t want to be there when someone inevitably came looking for them. He needed someplace quiet and uninhabited and safe.

He had no idea why he chose the Star Singer’s Platform, then. Perhaps it was the view of space and of the land of Sharanohiar spreading out underneath them, the bits and pieces of lost land giving way to the shadows of the steel of the Soreil. He climbed all the way to the top, where the Ar nosurge Tube glowed with a brilliant light, and only then set Akira down.

Akira leaned against the Tube, only a bit battered and bruised and windswept from the fights. Whatever enemies still existed here, they clearly had no sense of decorum, attacking someone so distraught. _“Why here?”_ he asked, voice raw.

 **I don’t know** , Yusuke picked.

He laughed, short and dry, and peeled an eye open to gaze out at the world he was so keen on saving, a planet slowly building itself up over a ship of refugees who had, over five thousand years, believed they would one day walk on soil again. They had lived and died and _lived_ for that distant hope, when in reality the ship and everyone on it hadn’t moved so much as an inch since the day it was launched into space.

 _“_ _I think I’d like a bath,”_ Akira said. He stretched his arms out, asking without speaking, and Yusuke picked him up again and carried him down the stairs to the Purification Site tucked away beneath the Platform.

Yusuke stoked the fire and waited for the water to boil as Akira shimmied, cursed, and yanked his clothes off, washed up, then dragged on the spare pair of trunks he reserved for Purification Ceremonies. Yusuke folded his clothes up as best he could as Akira tested the water and eased into the pot.

How odd, that a Goemon-style bath would sit right beneath the only connection to Earth on the entire ship, but Yusuke tried not to question these things. Obviously it was just the sort of thing that similar cultures were fated to create, and as Akira sighed and scrubbed at his face with his hands, Yusuke thought he welcomed it: a familiar sight when he was so far from home.

 _“_ _I’ve never actually bathed in one of these,”_ Akira said at last, hands still playing with the water. _“It’s—well, it’s definitely something. I wish you could enjoy it, too.”_

 **I don’t** , Yusuke picked, because it looked too much like being boiled alive. If the water became too hot Akira would cook like a lobster, never even aware of the danger until it was too late. It sounded like a terrible way to die.

 _“_ _If you say so.”_ He dived down, held himself there, then resurfaced. Sniffed as he wiped water from his eyes. _“And if Ren says there’s no way for me to go home, then I guess I have to accept it, don’t I?”_

**We’ll find a way.**

_“And if we don’t? Should I—should I just try to be—be happy here? Where Yuuki isn’t?”_

**Do you want to be happy without Yuuki?**

_“_ _No,”_ he said, pressing his hands to his heart again. Like Yuuki, but without the rings to twist around his fingers. _“I tried to think about it—living here with my friends, maybe ruling next to Ren or running a restaurant with Delta or another shop with Kanon, but it won’t be the same if Yuuki’s not here. I love him too much to let him go that easily.”_

And softer, as if embarrassed: _“And I thought you wouldn’t help me if you knew about him. If you thought you wouldn’t have a chance at loving me, I thought you’d leave. So many people left, before, and I didn’t want to be alone again. I couldn’t be alone again. I’ve needed your help just to get this far, after all.”_

**You never had to lie.**

_“_ _I didn’t know that you knew,”_ he said. _“You did, didn’t you? This whole time you knew. Was it that you couldn’t say?”_

**Yes.**

_“I thought so. But you can now, which means something’s changed, hasn’t it?”_

The Genometrics, or the deep bond Morgana had mentioned, or some combination of the two. The odd glitches and the misspelling of Akira’s name. Yuuki, pressing his hands to his heart to clutch at his rings.

Akira went on as he thought: _“I wonder if it’s because I’ve accepted you. You came back even when you didn’t need to. Is it—is it because of Yuuki? Is that even possible?”_

It couldn’t be. It had to be fate, or the universe, or some unnamed trickster god who thrust the app on Yusuke’s phone, out of all of his friends—Ryuji and Futaba would have been better choices. They knew games far better than Yusuke did, they were more interested in Ren Amamiya’s disappearance, they were more proactive in trying to solve the mystery—

And Yusuke wasn’t. When the app had appeared on his phone he’d relished the brief bit of attention it gave him—but then he swore Yuuki had stared at him with a hungry look in his eyes, and he began to feel that it was only a matter of time before his phone went missing out of his bag, left upstairs in the attic of Leblanc during one of their meetups—and he panicked, tossing it in Inokashira Lake.

And the app had come back, a boomerang made of radio waves and magic. Yuuki had been devastated anyway, and Yusuke had no choice but to do what fate clearly intended for him: bring Akira home. If it made Yuuki happy Yusuke was sure he would have done anything, but help the love of Yuuki’s life return home at the expense of Yusuke’s own happiness?

Fate was a cruel mistress indeed, and Yusuke, blinded by his own baser desires had done as it wished—but all that implied that it had to be for Yuuki. Because of Yuuki. Yuuki, the red string tying Yusuke and Akira together.

 **I don’t know** , he picked.

 _“_ _You said he loves me, before,”_ Akira said, _“and that you love him, too. That has to be it. The Ra Cielans have a tale of a god that sang the whole universe into existence—they say the only reason everything still exists is because of that god’s love. Maybe it’s the same for us and Yuuki.”_

His hands, pressing against his heart as the heat of the bath caused his skin to flush red—no, it was darker than that, a dark red like spilled blood shining from beneath his skin. The one hand glowed blue, his temple throbbed green; under the water his stomach had to be red, too, and the heel of a foot would shine blue. The crystals Yusuke had worked to collect in the Genometrics pulsed to the beat of Akira’s heart—but Yusuke had never put a crystal there. Had it—had it been there all along? Had he just not noticed?

No, Akira had been hiding it like he had hidden everything else, but he knew now, knew that continuing to hide and lie and keep his secrets wouldn’t do him any good. He knew that Yusuke loved Yuuki. He knew that Yusuke knew Yuuki loved Akira more. What good would it do him to pretend he wasn’t upset he couldn’t go home? What good would it do him to try to stay strong as his friends slapped him in the face by telling him he just had to learn to be happy here?

He would never be happy here; that much was painfully obvious.

 _“_ _And if that’s true, then I don’t need this anymore,”_ Akira went on, fingers tapping at his heart. _“He loves me. He loves me still; that’s all I need to keep going. So—so if it means I can be just a little stronger, if it means we can increase our chances of getting through this alive, I—you can—”_

His jaw quivered. He didn’t want to give it up, whatever that crystal was. He didn’t want to lose it. The **Ren Amamiya** crystal had barely gotten a reaction before, but this one was tearing him apart.

If it hurt him so badly, why was he saying he could part with it?

 _“_ _You can take it,”_ Akira breathed at last, sounding fit to take it back. His hands fell to the water with a splash; he screwed his eyes shut and clenched his jaw.

Would it be wrong not to look? Would it be wrong to walk out of the Site, wait for Akira to finish his bath, and head on their way? Would it be wrong not to trample on these feelings, the way Yusuke didn’t want anyone to see the depth of his love for Yuuki?

It couldn’t be wrong, but it felt like it would be.

It couldn’t be wrong, but if he didn’t Akira would question their bond. If he didn’t he would be leaving this boy and his vulnerable heart to hide in the shadows again. If he didn’t, Akira would never want to tell anyone else that there was a precious, beautiful boy he loved with every fiber of his being. If he didn’t, how would Akira tell his friends that there was someone he couldn’t bear to live without, and he wasn’t here on this ship or in this universe?

So Yusuke looked. It was only a crystal—only a piece of thought driving Akira to do better in battle, to withstand more attacks or to sing stronger than without—but it was his everything, his heart and his love and his desire, and Yusuke had never seen the shape such a clear love could take: two circles intertwined, like the rings on Yuuki’s necklace.

And much like how Yuuki’s rings were his proof of Akira’s existence, the crystal was simply **Proof of Yuuki**. It gave a series of rather weak benefits; if Yusuke worked the other crystals around, Akira would surely become stronger. No enemy, no matter how great, would be able to stand against them.

But he didn’t want to take it, couldn’t bring himself to take it. There were much better combinations he could come up with, but Yusuke couldn’t—wouldn’t—take this from him.

If he did, he would be no better than the ones telling Akira to be happy here, to throw his love away and learn to be content where he was. That love had been the only thing that had kept him going; that discontent had to be what would drive him to never lose hope of finding a way home.

He pulled back at last, letting the menu on his screen fade out as Akira’s face came back into view, squinting with confusion at the lack of pain that typically came with installing and exchanging crystals.

 **It’s strong** , Yusuke picked.

Akira blinked, his face lighting up slowly. _“Is it really?”_

 **Yes** , Yusuke lied.

They would have to do their best with what they had, because Yusuke wasn’t taking it. Not now that Akira was beaming at the water, hands at his heart again, and looking for all the world to see like a boy in love.

For all that he wished it hadn’t burdened him, Yusuke couldn’t take that love from anyone else.

* * *

“You’re going home tomorrow,” Kaoru’s dad said over dinner.

Shinya grunted, stabbing at his noodles. He didn’t want to think about going home, but he had to, didn’t he? His mom would worry, she would call the police about a kidnapping, and Kaoru’s dad would wind up hurt or in jail or both, all because Shinya didn’t want to deal with her.

“Dad,” Kaoru said, “I thought I told you—”

“You did,” his dad said, “but that’s not a reason for him to stay here. It’s not our place to intervene, Kaoru. He and his mother have to settle this themselves.”

Kaoru shook his head.

Shinya said, “If I go back there I’ll never be able to visit again. She doesn’t listen to me; she barely listens to anyone else. She’s so wrapped up in her head that nobody can break through to her.”

He had nearly a hundred new messages on his phone when he woke up this morning, all from his mom, all about how ungrateful he was and how hard she worked to give him everything he’d ever want and how she never got any respect.

 _Losers whine_ , he had thought, and deleted every last one.

“So you’d rather go through life pretending she doesn’t exist?”

“I just want her to be different. Better.” Less annoying, less likely to scream in his ear the second she saw him on the street.

“That’s not going to happen unless you talk to her, kid.”

“And that’s not going to happen because she never listens!”

Not to him, anyway, and not to his school, and not to their neighbors loudly gossiping by the washing machine that it was such a shame the Oda woman was never home, and what was she doing all day, leaving her son alone to fend for himself so often?

Kaoru’s dad set down his fork and leaned far over the table to stare him in the eye. “What other choice do you have, kid?”

He didn’t. That was the problem: while he could always call up some distant relative or his grandparents with a sob story about how awful his mom was, none of them would listen, either—and his grandparents were dead, killed in a car crash three years ago by some drunk idiot, so trying to talk to them would be a waste of his time—and while Kaoru hadn’t known that—

Well, his dad was just another adult shoving his nose where it didn’t belong, duh.

“But I can’t live like that,” he said, aware that it was a flimsy excuse. It was either back with his mom or off to the CPS, and all Shinya wanted was to stay right here. “I don’t know what she wants half the time. I don’t know how she’s going to react. I tell her one thing, she believes another. She doesn’t listen!”

“So make her listen. Sit her down and shout over her until she hears you.”

That was easier said than done, and the noise complaints they’d get for it would have the landlord breathing down their necks. The last thing he wanted to do was give his mom something else to whine and mutter about—but she already was, wasn’t she? How was she going to see him as a person if he never tried to talk to her?

He had to be better than her. He just wasn’t sure she would ever change, and what did a normal parent look and act like, anyway? It couldn’t be like his mom, and it couldn’t be like Kaoru’s dad, never home long enough to talk to their kids, keeping secrets and yelling at the school behind their backs, tattoos and pressed pantsuits creating the illusion of maturity. Shinya thought of that damn gym teacher, yelling in his face to cut his hair every class while his classmates snickered; was that tracksuit-wearing, balding teacher an adult? Were the people who didn’t care for anything more than their institution’s reputation adults?

Would Shinya become like that? He didn’t want to become like that.

“And if she doesn’t listen anyway?” he asked.

Kaoru’s dad leaned back in his chair, shrugged, and gave a smirk. “Then you do what you want and get out of there as soon as you can.”

“You want me to _wait_?”

“Not much else you can do, is there?” He scowled down at his plate, at Kaoru’s vegetable pasta and the bits of shredded cheese pale against his tomato slices. “She won’t know how you feel unless you say it, and if you’ve got to get nasty to be heard, then that’s what you have to do.”

Stop being his mom’s meek son, her little boy who can do no wrong, her precious baby—but he could still feel her nails digging into his shoulder, the pinpricks of her disappointment etched into him like scars.

She was always disappointed: in his grades, in his lack of friends, in his choice of friends when he did have any, in her bosses and coworkers and in the school district. It was always everyone else’s fault that her life wasn’t perfect. Shinya didn’t know why she expected it to be, just that she did, and the harsh reality was that it wasn’t and never had been.

He stabbed at his pasta. It wasn’t great—Kaoru had admitted it was a new recipe he wanted to try making at least once—but it was food, and it was more than Shinya could make without a dozen YouCube videos to guide him through it.

“Fine,” he said, against his better judgment. If it was only going to get harder, it would be easier to deal with now. “But I want Kaoru there, too. She needs to apologize to him.”

“She doesn’t need to do that,” Kaoru said. “I’m fine. She didn’t mean it.”

Shinya snorted. “She did mean it; that’s why she has to apologize. If she doesn’t I’ll never forgive her. She’ll hate that.”

“There, see? You’ve got it all figured out.” The look Kaoru’s dad gave him resembled something close to approval; Shinya couldn’t be sure if it was or not, but it made him warm.

He scowled at his plate and ate.


	19. Summer Vacation, The Second Thursday

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a mild description of a dead body around the end of Yusuke's scene--if that's not your thing, I've bolded the first few words of that paragraph so you can skip it, if you like.

Taishi Yamada couldn’t sleep.

He tossed and turned, the summer air suffocating in his tiny apartment with its broken AC. The TV next door was a mumble of voices and laughter through the wall; his phone, face down on the floor, mocked him for being the coward he was. Yamamoto and her weird group of online friends had been hounding him ever since Sunday as if they didn’t understand how completely suspicious it would be to stalk Mishima around town. Taishi hadn’t even tried to send him a message out of fear he’d be ignored.

He still grabbed at it. There were those sleep music videos on YouCube his sister always used; he could try one of those and see if it worked the wonders she insisted it did, and if not, well, his neighbors had to go to bed sometime, right?

Maybe he would sleep then—or maybe Mishima’s face would continue to haunt him, the distress and fear and wariness morphing into the vulnerability in the men’s room at the diner, the softness of his lips and the silkiness of his hair under Taishi’s hands. Taishi had been ready to laugh it off as a nervous mistake, to go their separate ways forever, to marry whatever poor girl would settle for a nobody like him—

Now all he wanted was Mishima. God _damn_ it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this: Yamamoto’s wide, wide grin and her blackmail and her bullshit; Mishima and his stupid fucking devotion and the adoration on his face when he touched his rings and the noises he’d made as Taishi kissed him senseless—

Damn it all. Damn them both.

It was all Taishi could do to stifle a sob of frustration into his pillow. His mom expected him to find a girlfriend—a wife—here in the middle of Tokyo, and all Taishi could think of was Mishima. It wasn’t fair; Taishi was supposed to be normal, was supposed to be just like everyone else—but he’d never been that way. Always on the outskirts, pushed to the back of the line in high school, ignored and ghosted and forgotten, always on purpose even if their mouths said it was on accident, and all because his dad just happened to be Japanese-American, a half-thing that had betrayed their country.

As if Taishi could do a damn thing about that.

His phone lit up with a phone call from—Segawa? Why would she be calling him so early in the morning? Was she okay?

“Segawa,” he said, picking up. “Are you—”

“I didn’t want to forget, so I called you,” she said. “Guess who I met today!”

What? “Uh, Togo?”

“Two more tries!”

“Why am I—why are you still awake? It’s two in the morning.”

“Like I said, I didn’t want to forget,” she said. It wasn’t an explanation. He had no idea what was going on. “Should I just tell you?”

“This can’t wait?”

“I thought it would be better to get it over with sooner rather than lose my nerve,” she said, as his phone started chiming. It buzzed in his hand like it was alive, over and over again. “I really can’t stand girls like her. They’re _awful_ , aren’t they?”

“Like… Togo?” As far as he remembered, Togo and Segawa hadn’t said two words to each other at the mixer, but Togo was refined and gave off an imperial air that had to make average, everyday girls seethe.

“No, like Yamamoto,” she corrected.

Yamamoto, doing something awful? Was blackmail not enough for her? He groaned, “What happened?”

“What do you think?”

With a statement like that, it could be anything. Taishi sighed and rolled over to face the ceiling, blue light from his phone washing it in unnatural gloom. Yamamoto could have cut in front of her in line, or worn the same socks, or said she was crushing on the same guy Segawa liked, and it would all be considered _awful_.

He didn’t understand girls. What was so great about them? Why did he have to go out and marry one and live miserably for the rest of his life, pretending to love her when he didn’t—couldn’t—would never—

Like how Yamamoto was pretending with him, right. Pretending to be his friend in public and then sending him death threats via text message. Like how he’d been pretending with Mishima, and now he wanted the real thing and more.

“What did she say, Segawa?” he asked. He could guess, but hearing what the backstabbing bitch was saying behind his back would help him drop her faster than a hot potato.

“Do you really want to know? Mishima didn’t.”

“Maybe he just didn’t want to know exactly what it was,” he said. “I do. Tell me, please.”

 _Make me angry enough to not care about how she’ll ruin my life for a stupid video game character_ , he wanted to say, but Segawa wouldn’t understand. He barely did, and he’d visited that forum more times in the past month or so than Yamamoto probably had since its conception.

“She said you were going to go fuck each other’s brains out when you left the mixer,” Segawa stated, voice dull and monotonous, like she was reading from a script. “Then when Kitagawa came back after trying to check up on you, she said you clearly couldn’t wait to find a hotel.”

“Shit,” he muttered. So it had been Kitagawa who had made that noise; it was Kitagawa who had dragged them back from doing just that in a back alley. Taishi was going to buy him the fanciest sushi in the city one day; Taishi was going to bash his head in for interfering.

God _damn_ _it_.

“He said Mishima threw up on your shoes, but Yamamoto started saying all sorts of things about how gays can fuck like rabbits and how they’ve got no sense of decorum. I don’t know why she would say something like that. Does she hate you, or gay people?”

“She hates me,” he said. Her and the rest of his high school class, sneering at his accent and his atrocious manners and never bothering to try and correct him, never bothering to help him figure all of this out. He’d been living in a new god damn country and no one was willing to give him a chance. “Mishima just got caught up in it, that’s all. Is he—is he okay?”

“He looked so much better, I was actually relieved!” Segawa said, and there was her cheery tone again. Odd how he didn’t miss it until it was gone. “Oh, and the curry was just as good as Kitagawa said! We should go together sometime!”

Go together. Him and Segawa, when the only person he wanted to sit beside was Mishima. What he’d give for one more chance to knock knees on accident; what he’d give to see Mishima comfortable, as he had been with Kitagawa, instead of panicking and searching for an escape route. He’d gone for too much too fast and Yamamoto would never understand that.

“You and… me? Like a—like a date?” he asked, just to be sure.

“Would you want it to be a date, Yamada?”

Yes. He should say yes. He should say he wanted to see her in a pretty sundress that complimented her eyes; he should say he wanted to get to know her better. He should want to see the way her face lit up at the sight of something she loved and enjoyed.

He should say yes. Segawa was a nice girl; if there was any girl out there he might end up loving, it would be Segawa.

But he didn’t want to lie, not when just the thought of Mishima and that back alley was enough to keep him awake.

“I don’t know,” he said, and swore the TV next door was getting louder.

“Well, that’s alright,” Segawa said with a light laugh. Was that a drum beat he was hearing, underneath the cheesy gameshow music, or—

Not a drum beat. Not a drum beat at all, he found, as a woman’s moans came through in an embarrassing moment of silence. Taishi hoped the rest of his neighbors complained in the morning, because it was too early for this. Taishi hoped they woke up kids with this noise and had to live with the shame.

“I don’t know if I would want it to be a date, either,” Segawa finished. Taishi wrenched his attention back to her. “But we could—oh! We could do a study group! You, me, and Mishima!”

“Do you think he’d agree to that?”

“Why wouldn’t he? We’re friends now; that’s what friends do.”

He wouldn’t because Taishi had scared him off. Mishima had agreed to be his friend, but that could have easily been a bluff to keep him from badgering Mishima about it.

Segawa wouldn’t understand that, but he was tired, and the god damn thumping from next door practically matched his pulse. That could be him with Mishima. That could be him with—

“I can’t be just his friend, Segawa,” he told her. “I can’t. My neighbors are fucking each other’s brains out and Yamamoto’s kind of right because I really, really wish that was me and him right now.”

“Oh,” she said, and very simply added, “well, you need to start as his friend, at least, don’t you?”

“He has a boyfriend.”

“Then I’ll help you find someone else! That way you can have a boyfriend, if you want, and Mishima can be your friend, too!”

That made him chuckle. “You make it sound easy.”

“Sure it is,” she said. “You’ve just been looking in the wrong places, maybe listening to the wrong people. Like Yamamoto. Girls like her deserve what’s coming to them.”

“You really don’t like her, do you?”

“No, I don’t.” Segawa sniffed. His neighbors got, somehow, even louder; he would have been tempted to bang on the wall if he couldn’t hear someone banging on their door already. “Girls like her—they’re awful. I can’t stand them. That’s why everyone gets to know just how awful she is, and I know that makes me just as bad as her, but I won’t let anyone talk like that. She tried to get the whole table to believe it, Yamada, and even if it was true she had no right to say it.”

“You’re a good person,” he told her. Better than he was, at any rate. Better than the guy who pretended at interest for months, eventually fell for his target, and hated himself for even thinking Yamamoto wasn’t up to the same juvenile bullshit as always.

Segawa sniffed. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” He heard the argument next door, now, muffled a bit by the distance to the door. He listened to the not-so-distant shouts of a man caught with his pants down and whatever poor sap had been woken by him, and barely realized it had been five minutes since Segawa had said anything. The call was still ongoing, but he couldn’t hear anything from her end anymore.

Maybe she fell asleep. Lucky her; he finally felt like he could, too, if the TV next door wasn’t still blaring.

“Good night,” he said, even though she couldn’t hear him, and hung up. He looked through the dozens of messages from the class chat—some them just as scandalized as Segawa, some of them just as audacious as Yamamoto, and some of them indifferent—and then flipped to Yamamoto’s group chat.

 **Count me out** , he sent, with no further explanation. It didn’t feel much like freedom, but it was a start.

* * *

Shinya hated the dread coursing through his body.

It was one thing to be physically powerless in the face of impending danger: stuck on a railroad track with a train barreling down; frozen on the street as a car didn’t heed the red light and plowed into pedestrian traffic; the split second between running out from under cover and being struck by a hail of bullets in Gun About; being manhandled off of a rock by a group of pissed off classmates.

It was another thing to be powerless, period, to be weaker and smaller and seen as a child when all Shinya wanted was to be seen as an adult—or someone who was about to be, anyway. Not as a king, like he’d thought for so long, but just as an adult, another person who deserved to be treated with respect and dignity and not like a baby.

His mom wasn’t home when they arrived. It was late enough in the morning that she could have gone to work, but her work shoes were still by the door, which meant she was skipping out again to do… whatever she was doing. Putting up missing posters or bothering the police again, and it made him wonder if she would even have a job once this was all over.

Probably not. She caused too much trouble when she was there; now she wasn’t going, which had to be worse.

“Come on,” he told Kaoru, who inched his way into the kitchen next to the door, as if Shinya’s mom was going to pop up from out of nowhere and start screaming like a banshee.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to tell her?” Kaoru asked, as Shinya led the way to his bedroom. He expected the mess: computer ripped open for the hard drive, everything he had stored under the bed now dumped on the sheets, the closet torn through. His schoolbag was in a corner with his notebooks scattered around, loose pages crumpled and stepped on and torn. His favorite jacket had a ripped sleeve.

Good thing he wasn’t one of those kids that kept a diary, or she would have snooped through that, too.

“No,” he said, surveying a splotch of ink on the wall where his mom had thrown his pens. Said pens were left to bleed into the carpet, and they stuck fast when he tried to pull them out. “Do you really think I can reason with her like this?”

“No,” Kaoru said, helping him rip pens off the floor. “I’ve been doing some reading, and—I just don’t think she can be reasoned with. She doesn’t want to be, or she would have listened to you before now. Dad has to know this, but he wants you to at least try to get her to understand you.”

Kaoru turned a pen around, his fingers tacky with dried ink. His voice went low as he said, “My mom abandoned me a little while after I was born. She just left me on a counter where Dad worked, said I was payment for her debts. Dad hates the fact that she didn’t even try to be a good mom to me, and I’ll never know her. You’ve got—you’ve got a chance to understand her, Shinya. You should take it.”

“And if I don’t want to, because I’m only thirteen? Who the fuck has to try and understand their own mom at _thirteen_?”

“You have to understand her, or you won’t be able to survive,” Kaoru said, “and I know that’s a harsh way of putting it, but it’s true. She’ll eat at you. She already is. You have to understand her and what she wants in order to keep her happy so she doesn’t throw you out and then claim anyone who takes you in is a kidnapper. Dad and I, we’re here for you, but there really is only so much we can do.”

“You’ll still be my friend, even though I’ve got a shitty mom who does this?”

Shinya motioned to the rest of the room. Why the hell had she thought that tearing through his things would bring him back? What had she hoped to find when she was ripping his clothes apart and tearing his summer homework into pieces?

(His teachers weren’t going to believe that. He could always just… redo it, and lie and say a dog ate the worksheets he couldn’t replicate. God, what a pain.)

Kaoru gave him a grin and poked him with his pens. “Of course I will. You still want to be my friend, even after all that stuff with the yakuza, right?”

“Well—” It had been scary. Terrifying, even, waiting in Kaoru’s room, hoping he was okay, too scared to leave in case he was next. If his mom thought Shinya staying over at his friend’s house without asking could be kidnapping, he’d hate to find out what she thought about actual kidnappers.

But it had been scary because Shinya knew the kind of damage a gun could do. Kaoru could have died; Shinya hadn’t wanted him to.

“I do,” he said, “still want to be your friend. You’re the only person who doesn’t care what kind of bitch my mom can be, you know.”

“You shouldn’t call her a bitch,” Kaoru admonished.

Shinya rolled his eyes. Uh-huh. Sure.

Then they looked at the room, at the mess she’d left in her wake, like a tornado or a rampaging bull would, with little to no thought of who or what she was hurting.

“Well, uh,” Kaoru said, “maybe we can clean up while we wait?”

“I swear you’re a neat freak.”

“Would you rather do it on your own?”

“No,” he said, thinking of how he was going to spend his last days of summer vacation taping his homework back together, if it could be salvaged at all. If they cleaned everything else up now, he’d have more time to deal with that tomorrow, if he even wanted to bother with it after today.

“Then let’s get started,” Kaoru said, and immediately started organizing. Unripped clothes in one pile, ripped ones in another. Kaoru could sew them up if Shinya could find him a kit, but it didn’t have to be today, and they settled instead on sewing classes at Kaoru’s once all of this blew over. None of the junk under his bed was damaged, so they shoved it all back into the boxes and stashed it all away.

His textbooks, though—they weren’t ruined, just crumpled and torn in spots, still perfectly usable if he ignored the tape and the crinkle of paper as he turned pages and the way they didn’t fit neatly into his bag anymore. He’d never cared before, but there was less space now, and his notebooks were almost completely trashed. Kaoru flipped through one as Shinya scooped up the shreds of his summer homework, ready to place them in the pile with the rest—and froze at the sight of his mom in the doorway, standing there and staring.

Glaring, more like.

“What do _you_ want,” he said, dumping his handful.

“What is that boy doing here?”

“He’s helping me clean up the mess _you_ made because he’s _my_ friend,” Shinya said.

“Is that so,” she said, and Shinya heard the argument: he wasn’t Shinya’s friend, he was a waste of time, he was a kidnapper, he was no good for her dear baby boy. But she didn’t say that; instead she said, “And you think I can’t clean up my own mess, Shinya?”

“You had two days to and you didn’t,” he countered, dread turning his knees to mush and his hands sweaty.

She was going to yell. He was right.

“So you think I’m worthless, do you?” she bit. “Just like your father? That all I do is nag, when all I _really_ do is worry? Do you have _any_ idea how hard it is to raise a child on your own in this economy? Do you have _any_ idea how hard I have to work to give you everything I do? I don’t have to, you know; I don’t have to do _anything_ , but you’re _my_ son and I won’t sit back and watch everyone else try to ruin your future like they did mine!”

Shinya thought of his tests. Thirty on his latest math quiz; twenty on English, the highest score he’d ever gotten no higher than forty-four. How he’d ever gotten into a middle school was his guess; maybe his mom had something to do with it.

He didn’t want to think about high school. There were kids in his class already setting their sights on one school or another, and they were only in their first year. Kaoru got grades that were miles better than Shinya’s, and even he barely got into his school of choice.

“No one ruined your future,” he said, aware that the only thing he’d ever put time and effort into was Gun About. Of course he’d failed at everything else, then. He hadn’t tried. “You did, all on your own; the only one who could have ruined it was you. You didn’t try, you didn’t make plans in case you failed, you didn’t do anything except look at everyone else doing better than you were and blaming them for how badly you were doing!”

Because she was just like him, blaming the teachers for making boring lessons instead of trying to pay attention and learn shit. Because she was just like him, ready to say that it was everyone else’s fault they were duped until it was his turn to be. Because she was all he knew, and all he knew of her were the complaints and the passing of guilt and the stifling feeling of her nails on his shoulders.

“How dare you,” she breathed, those same nails digging into her palms; Shinya marveled at her unbroken skin, at the blood that never dripped, and was vaguely aware of Kaoru turning to take it all in. “How _dare_ you. Get this boy out of my house, Shinya. You’re grounded until you learn how to show some respect.”

Respect, ha. She wasn’t listening. She never listened; why did that mean he had to listen to her? If she never respected him, why couldn’t he do the same?

He opened his mouth to argue but jumped as Kaoru’s hand caught his sleeve. “It’s fine,” he said, softly enough that Shinya’s mom couldn’t hear. “You can always call me, if you want.”

Because she wouldn’t take his phone with his train pass on it, right—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t take it once he was home, and keep it from him until he was ready to leave in the morning.

Maybe he’d go to school with his newly-ripped uniform, with some of the buttons torn off his shirt. Maybe he’d like to see how the teachers reacted to that, instead of to his ruined summer homework.

Kaoru left. Shinya’s mom watched him go like a hawk, and it was at the point when Kaoru shut the front door that Shinya slammed his bedroom’s closed, shoving his desk chair under the knob for good measure. His mom pounded and pounded at the wood, screaming at him to open it, how dare he do this, how dare he do this to her of all people—

He stifled his screams into his pillow until his throat was raw, until she stopped pounding away at his door and retreated to do something else, anything else.

Just as he thought, talking hadn’t done a damn thing. All it had done was get him into worse trouble; all it had done was make him realize that he couldn’t wait until he was twenty and old enough to move as far away as possible so he could never see her face again; maybe Kaoru would go with him. They could be roommates. That’d be nice.

Nicer than here, anyway.

* * *

Delta snapped to attention as the door swung shut behind the robot. Yusuke didn’t question how it fit through such a small frame and was just glad to see Akira again.

He was not glad to see him strapped to the bed, stripped down to his trunks under the blankets. He was not glad to hear the noises that came out of his mouth in his sleep, the moans and whimpers and quiet pleas for help.

 _“Ren said you guys’ve been Diving,”_ Delta said. _“Do I, uh, want to know?”_

 **No.** Yusuke barely wanted to know. Yusuke had seen right through the thin veil of symbolism in that woman’s soulscape, and felt he understood perfectly that there were no good adults anymore.

 _“_ _Shit,”_ Delta said softly. _“I knew it was bad, but.”_

Then, more explosively: _“Shit.”_

Akira’s eyes shuttered open, the whites showing as he remained trapped in whatever nightmare his mind had conjured. _“Yuuki,”_ he moaned, _“where is—”_

And he broke off into a sob. His arms shook, fighting the restraints until his eyes shut again and he was pulled back down into the nightmare.

 _“_ _Wish I knew who he was asking for,”_ Delta said, wringing out the rag in the bucket and wiping away sweat. _“If it’s somebody on the ship, I could grab them. Or, uh, you could.”_

**It’s not.**

Delta laughed. _“Yeah, figures it wouldn’t be that easy.”_

Yusuke wished he had the fine motor controls to worm the robot’s hand under the blanket. The touch of cool metal would be soothing, would be reminiscent of Yuuki and Akira’s time with him, but he couldn’t, and with Delta blind and his nerves dead to their connection, Yusuke couldn’t ask him to do it for him. He was having enough trouble just bringing the rag to actual skin, cursing as he worked in slow motion.

_“_ _Why’d the girls make me do this, huh? Ren would’ve been better.”_

**Ren is cooking.** He’d spouted some nonsense about chicken soup being better than rice porridge for a cold, and Yusuke hadn’t had the chance to disagree.

Where would Ren even obtain poultry from?

 _“_ _I_ can _cook—okay, no, I can’t, not like this. But nothing Ren makes is going to be very edible, either.”_

**The girls had taken over,** **last** **I checked.**

Delta heaved a heavy sigh. _“If there’s a restaurant left for me to take back after this is done, I’ll be surprised.”_

They sat in silence. Yusuke bit the bullet and shoved the robot’s hand somewhere on Akira’s exposed chest, causing him to yelp in his sleep. When he calmed down Delta asked, _“Did you mean what you said in the Tube? That you’re just trying to help us out_ _and take them home_ _?”_

**You remember?**

_“_ _Yeah,”_ he said, staring off into a space only he could see. _“I don’t have anything else to remember, after all. Cass keeps hoping it’ll come back to me, but it won’t until this is all over, and I’m starting to think we can’t do it without you. If you’d left us like that, I don’t think we’d be here right now, so… thanks. For helping us.”_

He couldn’t say that he wasn’t doing this for them, at this point. He’d come too far to back down, for one, and for two, the amount of people with the app still installed dwindled by the day. The farthest user, someone by the name of Sakaki, was about to fight the final boss. The amount of forum users cheering him on through his daily updates was staggering. Yusuke wished he had half of his support, but gaining it would require an account on the forum—Futaba could hack it, discover it was him, he would have to explain himself…

 **It’s no trouble** , he picked instead.

_“_ _Good to hear.”_

More silence. Akira thrashed in a sudden seizure that was curtailed only by the straps holding him in place; he choked on air, a horrible wet sound coming from his throat, and his eyes shot open, this time for real. His pupils were pinpricks with fear; he thrashed some more against the straps.

 _“_ _Hey, calm down,”_ Delta tried, but Akira didn’t hear him—couldn’t hear him over the sound of his own panting breaths, as if his lungs couldn’t get enough air.

 **It’s just a nightmare** , Yusuke picked, and that stuck: Akira took one deep breath after another, glancing from the robot to Delta and back again, arms moving as he struggled to sit up.

 _“_ _Why did you—”_ he started to ask, but coughed.

 _“_ _You socked me in the gut a couple times on our way here,”_ Delta told him, _“and Ren thought you wouldn’t try to run off on your own if we did. That was reckless, you know.”_

Instead of answering, Akira chose to turn his head and stare at the wall. Delta sighed in defeat—if Akira hadn’t learned this lesson once, he wasn’t going to learn it now—and declared, _“I’m going to go get some more water, maybe see how that soup’s coming along. I’ll be right back.”_

He wouldn’t be right back, but that was alright. Yusuke had some things to say, if the app let him.

Akira waited until the door shut to say, _“I won’t try to leave. Can you untie me? It’s… well, you know, don’t you.”_

He did. The straps weren’t easy to undo, and he wound up hacking at them with the laser sword that had taken out more enemies than he could count; Akira rubbed at the marks the straps left as he sat up and hugged his knees. He looked small like that, and exactly as vulnerable as Yusuke remembered him being that week they took Yuuki’s phone. He’d been scared and angry and utterly defenseless, all but useless in the grand scheme of another world.

 _“_ _I didn’t want to remember,”_ he said, after some time. _“Not—not that. It was there, but I didn’t want to remember it, and I thought if I shoved it down it wouldn’t be so bad. Guess I was wrong.”_

**You were. Why try to hide it?**

_“_ _I think you know why.”_

**Not the memory** , Yusuke corrected. **If you weren’t feeling well** —

 _“_ _We don’t have time for… this,”_ Akira said, gesturing to the room and the sound of faint laughter from the other side of the door. _“Goro needs us to help him, and we have to stop Prim, and the Soreil won’t last much longer—a day, no, an hour makes all the difference now between stopping her or being destroyed, and I want to go home. I don’t want to die here, not like this.”_

**You need to rest, too.**

_“_ _I know that,”_ he snapped, _“but there’s no time to!”_

 **Yuuki wouldn’t** —

_“_ _Don’t bring him into this!”_

— **want you to hurt yourself by doing too much** , Yusuke finished. **If you don’t feel well, you need to rest.**

 _“_ _I know that.”_ He took a deep breath and let it out slow. _“I_ know _that, I do. And I know I’m the only one who can help, I just—I just wish—”_

 **He’ll always be waiting** , Yusuke lied. **No matter how long it takes.**

 _“_ _Ion, look!”_ The door burst open; Ren appeared, with a tray of rice balls and a glass of water, oblivious to the way Akira went still as he went on, _“I think they turned out pretty well, and the soup’s almost done, and—uh. What? You’re—you’re not gonna puke, are you?”_

 _“_ _Go away,”_ Akira told him.

_“_ _Huh?”_

_“_ _Leave! Get lost!”_

_“_ _I was just—”_ He froze at Akira’s glare, then set the tray down as gently as he could. _“Geez, okay, I’m going! I’m going!”_

 **He’s only trying to help** , Yusuke picked, as Akira staggered over to the tray and dragged it to the bed.

 _“_ _I know,”_ Akira said, before downing the glass of water.

 _“_ _I_ know _,”_ he insisted, before devouring a rice ball. He began to sniff and shiver before he was halfway through it, and wrapped himself up in the blanket. _“I just hate that name. Ion. It’s not mine, and it’s not who I am. Yuuki gave me a better one.”_

 **You prefer it** , Yusuke guessed.

A new name, like a new identity. Not Ren or Ion but Akira, rising from the ashes and out of the darkest time of his life like a phoenix at the dawn of a new day; Akira nodded, sniffed some more, and wiped his nose on the blanket.

 _“_ _You know, sometimes,”_ he said, and Yusuke guessed it was the fever talking, that desire to be comforted in ways only sickness could bring about, _“sometimes you remind me of him. It’s almost like you’re the same—like you’ve been hurt, too, and it stuck around. It haunts you. I wish—I wish you were him, instead.”_

 **I’m not** , Yusuke picked, **but I know your name.**

Akira’s eyes went glassy and distant. _“He told you.”_

**I told you. He loves you very much, Akira.**

Akira had no words for that; instead he collapsed face-first into the pillow and cried.

It had to be the fever and the recent Dive unlocking memories best left forgotten—or it could simply be that without Yuuki around, Akira’s will to stay strong and act like the Emperor he used to be was crumbling. He had to know by now that he didn’t have to pretend, but it had taken months to get to this point, months of struggling to be heard and keeping his anger in check and fighting, months where every day the ship lost another inhabitant to the Sharl and the Flask Sea and the woman who proclaimed herself a god.

Yusuke had no doubt that once she was done with the ship, she would simply move on to other planets, other people, other galaxies. That woman would consume the universe to feed her delusion of carrying everyone to a happier plane of existence.

She had to be stopped, but Akira had to get well first.

 _“_ _—can’t believe you didn’t bring him the pitcher,”_ Delta said, barging in, said pitcher in hand. Water sloshed over the side and dripped down his hand. Ren protested feebly from behind him, violet eyes wide as he peeked in, waiting to see if Delta was yelled at, too.

 _“_ _Ugh, dammit,”_ Delta cursed as he picked his way across the floor. _“Earthes, where’s that tray—or the table, where’s the table—”_

 **It’s over here** , Yusuke picked, guiding him over.

 _“_ _Thanks,”_ Delta said, as someone dragged Ren back into the kitchen and shut the door. Then he left, too, to keep supervising the soup, and Akira had fallen asleep again sometime in those few minutes. Yusuke straightened him out as best as he could, left the robot standing at his bedside, and got up to stretch.

He didn’t expect to see Nakanohara standing in the kitchen, a glass a water in hand.

“I—you’re home,” Yusuke said.

“It’s my day off,” Nakanohara said.

“Oh,” was all he could think of to say to that. He couldn’t remember if it had come up in conversation or not, could barely remember what they eaten this morning. Rice, obviously. Maybe eggs.

Nakanohara paid no heed to that. “I was wondering if you’d like to go someplace for dinner tonight. I’ve been craving okonomiyaki lately, and it would do you some good to get out of the house.”

“I… suppose so,” Yusuke agreed. He _had_ been spending too much time in his room, with his cans of potato sticks and tubes of paint and the app, but leaving meant potentially running into Yuuki or Ryuji, and Yusuke wasn’t prepared for whatever confrontation would occur.

And underneath, when his head stopped spinning as Nakanohara talked about the restaurants they could visit: _Just because he doesn’t love you back doesn’t mean you have to hide away._

But this was more than hiding. This was also protecting Yuuki from whatever sharp words his hurt pride could inflict; Ryuji had been hurt by them, Ryuji had nearly struck him for them. He hated to think of what Yuuki would do.

(Yuuki would believe every word. Yusuke knew it, deep in his bones; Yuuki would believe every word and he would hate himself for it, and Yusuke would not be able to handle it.)

“Yusuke?”

“Yes?” he asked, shaking the thoughts from his head. He felt so sluggish, lately. It had to be leftover shock from the mixer, and his poor diet. He had tried to be thorough, but some shards from the dishes still wound up in his mouth. He’d eaten them anyway; it wasn’t good to waste food.

“You are alright, aren’t you? If you aren’t, we don’t have to go,” Nakanohara said.

He wanted to laugh. He wanted to cry. He wanted to scurry back to his room where Akira was waiting, where he wouldn’t have to leave except to get water, where he wouldn’t have to face what an awful person he was. The light of day would expose him for the malignant _thing_ he was becoming.

“When—” he forced out through a sudden wave of dizziness, the kitchen light too bright and too dim all at once, a strange force behind his lungs like the promise of a knife stabbing him in the back, “when is my next appointment, Nakanohara?”

“I believe it’s the twentieth of September,” Nakanohara said. “But, you do recall you can ask for additional appointments, Yusuke. He’s very good at responding when you need him.”

“I do—yes, I will do that. But, for now—may I,” he cleared his throat. The world, it seemed, was against him. “May I ask you for a favor?”

“Certainly,” Nakanohara said.

“You might think it childish.”

“The only thing I will deem childish from you at this point will be breaking our deal, Yusuke,” he said.

“I—” He cleared his throat. How odd, that when he finally worked up the nerve to ask, it was so difficult. So impossible. He’d never had to ask, because it was never something he wanted. The wants and desires that came so easily to others were dammed up in his throat by too many years of it being childish. Grown men didn’t need what he wanted to ask for. Artists didn’t thrive off what he wanted to ask for.

“Yusuke,” Nakanohara said, rounding the island and the table to put a hand on his shoulder. “You can ask me for anything. I know you’re aware of that.”

Since his voice refused to work, Yusuke only nodded. He reached out, gripped at Nakanohara’s shirt and tugged, lightly enough that Nakanohara would understand.

He hoped he would understand. He didn’t want to have to ask.

 _ **You need to rest**_ , he’d told Akira, when really what he needed was the touch and the voice of the one he loved. He would have to make do with his friends and with Yusuke for the time being; he would have to make do until it was all over and done with and he was on his way home at last.

As Nakanohara pulled him into a stiff hug—still a hug, even if Nakanohara didn’t seem to know what to do with his hands other than let them rest on Yusuke’s back; still a hug, because it was warm and embracing and everything Yusuke had been seeking from his bedsheets these last few days—he could only think that it was almost over. He would have to wait and see how Sakaki did with the final boss, what tactics and strategies could be employed to win and what to avoid if he lost, and the last stretch of Akira’s journey would be over.

They were so close that victory was almost tangible. They were so close that Yusuke didn’t want to risk failing because of Akira’s inclination to rush ahead, blindly running after whatever goal was within reach.

(None of the others who had made it this far had mentioned Akira getting sick. The glitch wasn’t happening to anyone else. No one had the same connection to Akira that Yusuke did.

It gave him hope—that they could triumph, that they could succeed, that they could perform the miracle that bringing Akira and Goro home was proving to be. It gave him hope.)

He pulled Nakanohara even closer, and clung tight to what was left after all of his mistakes.

It felt like forever before he could let go. Nakanohara was still stiff as a board despite the hours or minutes it had lasted, and Yusuke wondered briefly if that was why Kayo had dumped him: because he wasn’t much good with affection, giving or receiving, and she wanted a man who could.

“Ah,” Nakanohara said, and cleared his throat as Yusuke pulled away, “was that—I mean, do you feel a bit better now, Yusuke?”

 _No_ , he wanted to say. There was the heat rapidly turning cool on his body, and he had felt so cold lately, trapped up here of his own accord. He missed the warmth and the tiny, subtle noises Nakanohara had made; it was different than the way hugging Yuuki and Ryuji had been, but still pleasant.

How had he gone for all these years without it?

“Yes,” he said, wiping the faint film of sweat on his hands on his shirt. “Thank you.”

“No need to thank me. I’m just glad you’re feeling better.”

Or so he said, smoothing the wrinkles out of his shirt as he turned. The faintest hint of red was on his cheeks; he would want a moment alone before they left to compose himself, surely. “I will go wash my face, then,” Yusuke said.

“Yes, of course,” Nakanohara said, and Yusuke ducked into the bathroom—quite literally, as he had grown tall enough that his head brushed the doorjamb and he felt he would one day be tall enough to brush even the ceiling, and wondered often where he would find an apartment with ceilings higher than he could reach—and ran the sink, noting briefly that Nakanohara went to his bedroom and came back out shortly after.

Yusuke changed his clothes and rejoined him by the dining table; there was a large canvas covering nearly the entire surface, the wrapping cloth being tugged this way and that as Nakanohara struggled to adjust it. Yusuke helped him, taking in the simple scene of a black-eyed susan resting in a mason jar of water on a wooden table, the glass painted in careful strokes that would have taken Yusuke days, if not weeks, to paint himself.

“I didn’t realize you were done,” he said, as Nakanohara hid it from sight with the cloth. He tied the knot tight, slipped a letter under the fold, and ran his hand over it.

He looked as if it hurt, to pack it away under cloth and give it up. It always hurt to, with Madarame; Yusuke had thought it was because he changed them subtly, gave them a form or took a piece of it away, and the original beauty was lost behind his graceless brushstrokes.

But, no. It was hard to give it up at all.

“It’s only one painting, Yusuke,” Nakanohara said. “Did you—did you really believe you could win when it was three to one?”

“No, I didn’t,” Yusuke said.

“Well.” He cleared his throat, gathered up the painting, checked for his wallet in his pocket. “We need to make a stop before the restaurant, then, or the scent will seep in. That’s how it is with canvas sometimes, and afterwards we’ll eat.”

“Very well,” Yusuke sighed. He couldn’t stop Nakanohara from seeing Kayo now. What would she do when confronted with the man she thought had stopped stalking her? Would she take the painting, knowing Nakanohara made it for her?

Instinct told him no. She was going to scream, and call the police, and then Yusuke would be out of a home.

No home, no friends—at least he would still have his job, and a place to sleep in the studio on campus. He didn’t need much anymore. He never had.

As they boarded the train, he cataloged what he could leave versus what he would take: his phone and charger, obviously; his sketchbooks and the portraits; some clothes and his wallet; the various textbooks he needed for class. Everything else he could live without or replace, if he had to, and he tried to imagine the look on the landlord’s face as he discovered _Desire_ , its swirls and eddies both disturbing and captivating the eye, to the point where not even Yusuke could look at it directly anymore without feeling sick to his stomach.

(That was how he knew it was done: the vague sensation of nausea and vertigo while looking at it, not just while painting it. _Desire_ was an ugly thing that forced the viewer to confront him- or herself, and Yusuke was not proud of it. Not even the tiniest bit.

… Maybe just the tiniest bit.)

Then he wondered what his friends would think if they ever saw it—if they were still his friends or if this whole debacle had ruined even that for Yusuke—but didn’t try very hard to: they would hate it, Yuuki especially, because it would turn their already fragile mental states into a minefield. Futaba would see faces in every twist and twirl of paint; Ryuji would see anger and resentment and jealousy; and Yuuki—

The train screeched to a stop. Nakanohara was moving, exiting with his painting in hand, and Yusuke fought the crush of people to follow. He didn’t recognize the station as it passed by in a blur, too focused on Nakanohara’s bowl cut and avoiding anyone milling about on the platform. His long legs finally came in handy here; catching up and avoiding running into anyone was simple enough when he was a head taller than the crowd and could very nearly see where everyone was going.

When he’d first surpassed five and a half feet, he had entertained the notion that his father was tall. According to Madarame, his mother hadn’t been, which left his height to his father.

After all, it certainly wasn’t a product of Madarame’s neglect. Malnourishment didn’t produce men over six feet tall; it produced children with bloated bellies and teenagers who stashed loaves of bread under their beds until it turned green and fuzzy with mold. Every scrap of food was a godsend, and Yusuke knew that well, if his tower of potato sticks was any proof.

It was convenient, at least, when he was too absorbed in sketching or painting to leave for the kitchen. He should keep water bottles beside it.

But, no—that wasn’t the point. The point was that he was glad he was tall, and that Nakanohara had such a strange haircut from a few too many years of cutting his own hair—the result of not having enough money to afford a barber—because it made him easy to follow even as the crowd thickened around them.

And so did the various men and women who glanced up from their phones long enough to watch them go by, stopping in their tracks at Yusuke’s height or his face, as they tended to do and how he wished they wouldn’t. It made him feel— _strange_ was the only word for it, after years and years of pressing his nose to his sketchbooks and being forgotten in Madarame’s shadow. He’d believed people would only want to look at him as a potential connection to the art world and Madarame.

He was wrong. He was nothing and no one now, and yet they still stared, and he was beginning to understand why Yuuki hated the attention so much: it distracted him, their eyes staring daggers that left pinpricks on his skin that stayed long after he was gone. Yusuke rubbed his arms against the sudden inexplicable chill in the muggy station, and then he was next to Nakanohara on the street, the open air neither worse nor better.

Nakanohara, never one to waste words on simple things like directions, barely took note of him. They surged down the sidewalk, past cars at a standstill in the evening traffic, their taillights setting Nakanohara’s shirt awash with the color of blood; right then he could have been a man on his way to or from a murder instead of a man who had won a bet to see the love of his life again.

Well, they—they could be the same thing, Yusuke thought. Nakanohara was determined, his jaw clenched and his face steeled, and Yusuke had watched him wrap the painting, so he knew there wasn’t a weapon hidden between the folds of cloth. Just the letter, and depending on the contents it could be as potent as a knife.

Kayo was a very distraught woman. Nakanohara had to know that.

(Yusuke should have checked the letter. It was too late now.

Yusuke shouldn’t have made that bet. It was far too late now.)

When they arrived at an apartment complex Nakanohara hesitated only briefly before heading inside. Yusuke expected him to march straight over to the elevator, to wait in front of Kayo’s door; instead he knocked on a door near the banks of mailboxes, exchanged a hushed conversation with the security guard or receptionist on the other side, then handed over the painting. He bowed and turned back to the entrance and then they were back out on the street again, and Yusuke could no longer contain himself as they headed back to the station.

“Why?” he asked. “Leaving it with that—that man, you’ve no idea if he’ll truly give it to her.”

“Because I know it’s something she’ll love despite who made it,” Nakanohara answered, “as you instructed, Yusuke. By now my face must be drifting into the fog of memory; seeing me and attaching me to the painting is a surefire way that she’ll reject it. I have a chance that she’ll keep it this way, instead of her throwing it in the trash as soon as she’s able.”

“You can’t blame her if she does.”

“No, and I won’t know if she does, either.” He sighed, stopping for a moment to push up his glasses and rub at the bridge of his nose. “I don’t plan on seeing her again. You were right; I was just like Madarame, holding her freedom hostage with my actions. I made her hate me but I couldn’t see it. I was too blinded by the unjustness of it all: her rejection of my love, Madarame’s arrest, you in the hospital… You could have died, Yusuke, if that gym teacher hadn’t been so cautious. That’s what I was told: that you could have died, and I knew if you did it would have been that old man’s fault, and I—”

He broke off with a shudder, sighing again. “We were students once, under the same teacher. You were so much younger than the rest of us, but talented, and you loved art as much as we did. I thought, then, that if you died it would have been my fault, too, for not taking you along when I could have. Madarame was an old man who lived in a shack that some would barely call a home; I could have fought for custody. You had no family that we knew of, no one to fight for you. I should have done it. I should have done it, but I also thought that if the rest of us weren’t there he wouldn’t push you so hard. I was wrong. You were—you were—”

“I know,” Yusuke said. Just an art-making machine. Just Madarame’s prized cash cow. What need did he have for sleep or food or school when he should have been at the atelier, painting. How his head buzzed with want as he forced his eyes to stay open at the easel; how Madarame had glowered with disgust at the waste when both brush and palette fell from his hands as he dozed. Yusuke hated that look, and hated being the cause of it.

He had still craved praise, then. Even the smallest amount was enough to keep him working through the tremors and the dizziness and the other cries of his body as it wanted and needed and began the slow process of shutting down on him; if it had been anyone other than a teacher at school who had found him collapsed—if it had been Madarame—he would have died.

Yusuke was still torn between accepting it as the escape it was from Madarame and all the things he had never given, and being unable to create. The dead did not make art, and yet Madrame hadn’t cared.

Perhaps he would have cared, if Yusuke died, but that was no longer an issue. Yusuke wasn’t dead and Madarame was behind bars and laughing at them all as they—lawyers and art experts and those former students like Nakanohara that were willing to speak and could remember—struggled to sort out the long list of paintings taken and given and outright stolen from those under his care.

 **Nakanohara looked at him, then** , in the bloody wash of traffic, and was likely seeing the same thing: Amano, with his shirt and pants soaked in a mixture of vomit and blood, and yet more blood around him creeping into the cracks between the bathroom tiles and dripping from the toilet bowl and one eye, half-open and staring lifelessly. How much blood there had been—how Yusuke had felt, deep in his stomach before he ran from the room and vomited in the bushes through an open window, that there had been too much blood to possibly come from a human, that maybe Amano had been playing with some new watercolor and spilled it all over the tile and smacked his head open on the toilet but would be alright if he went to the hospital and got stitches the way Sugino had after she sliced her hand open with a palette knife.

(Perhaps Sugino’s wound, too, hadn’t been an accident. Perhaps she had only lied about it being one. Yusuke would never know; she was gone like the others and he would never see her again.)

“I know,” Yusuke said again, trying to chase away the memories. Yusuke could have been like Amano, but he wasn’t. There was no need to dwell on it.

Nakanohara nodded, not satisfied but accepting of the fact that Yusuke did understand. How could he not, after everything Madarame had done and said to him were finally revealed in the proper light?

Then he turned and went on, and Yusuke followed. That was enough for now, until it reared its head again and tried to drag them both back to the days they had so very narrowly escaped.

It was enough. Yusuke shivered and wished it was true.

* * *

Ryuji sighed and sat back, resisting the urge to toss his pencil across the cafe. He was done—finally—but it didn’t feel all that great. His brain felt like it had melted at some point; he picked up his drink and held the bottle to his temple, trying and failing to leech some coolness from it.

“Boss,” he didn’t whine, “can’t ya turn the air on?”

“It is on,” Boss said from the counter. “I run a cafe, remember?”

Which meant the heat from the simmering pots of curry on the stove canceled out any cool air that might have been trying to circulate.

What Ryuji would give for a fan. Or a pool. Or to not be so conscious about his ma’s budget that he turned the air off to save money and loitered around Leblanc as he struggled to finish his summer homework. Ann had come by and they’d hung out for a while but the heat just wasn’t all that great for hugs and kisses and whatever that had been, days ago on the phone with Yusuke. Had they cuddled? Was that what that was?

Whatever it had been, they’d separated with a nice film of sweat covering them, and Ann had wrinkled her nose at the feeling, and pouted about feeling gross even though she was plenty happy he got to come over.

Anyway. Air conditioning. Ryuji missed it.

“Futaba says when it’s hot out like this I should serve ice cream,” Boss said from out of nowhere. He was watching the weather report and stroking his goatee and frowning as he pulled out a loose hair.

He got up to throw it away. Ryuji said, “I’d dig that, but ya don’t have the freezer space.”

“Tell that to Futaba.”

So he did, digging his phone out of his pocket and shooting off the text as the door jingled open.

It was seven-thirty, so it couldn’t have been Futaba or her mom; instead it was Doctor Goth and Miss Prez Niijima and a—girl? Woman? She looked to be the same age as Prez, but she had a kid cradled in her arms, so there was no way—mother and child. He thought he recognized her. Maybe it was the hair.

“Oh, good,” Doctor Goth said, after Boss said his welcomes and the girls stood by the door, looking awkward. “Maybe now my guinea pig can sample your coffee.”

“I don’t really need to do that,” Niijima said, taking the kid from her mom, who smoothed out her shirt and adjusted the diaper bag strap on her shoulder. Ryuji got up to dig the high chair out of the closet, which was only a little cooler than it was out in the cafe.

“Third time’s the charm,” Doctor Goth said, sitting at a table.

Niijima let the mom into the booth first, the diaper bag disappearing under the table. She got the kid into the chair with only a little difficulty, as she stared at Ryuji and kicked her feet and sucked on her fingers.

Ryuji wasn’t sure what to do with the kid—smile? Wave? Make some weird goofy face that would make him look stupid and might just make her scream?—so he did nothing, dropping back down into his seat and starting the process of shoving all of his papers and textbooks into his bag. He could hear Niijima wincing at the crinkle of paper.

He couldn’t help but grin. Stained shirts and tiny toddler bows and wrinkled clothes or no, she _was_ still Miss Prez Niijima, keeper of order and discipline. She would hate Yusuke and the way paint got all over everything he owned—

His grin fell. Damn Yusuke. _Damn_ it.

“You really didn’t need to do this,” the mom said after they ordered.

“It’s the least I can do for my guinea pig,” Doctor Goth said. “And I wanted to meet this friend of hers she’s been working so hard for. I was wondering what type of person you’d be, but a doting mother wasn’t one of them.”

The mom had nothing to say to that. Niijima stepped in. “Haru’s had a lot to deal with these past few months, doctor, so—”

“Yes, I know,” she answered with a curling smile. Was she happy her expectations were wrong, or was the little smirk supposed to be something else?

Shit, Ryuji wished he was better at reading people. She could be plotting something, and none of them would ever know.

“I really am grateful for all you’ve done,” the mom, Haru, said. “Mako said she was helping you in return, but—you never had to in the first place.”

“I’m a doctor,” Doctor Goth replied simply. “It’s my job to, and I got more than my fair share out of our little bargain. I can buy you dinner as thanks for sticking around until the end, can’t I?”

The two girls went quiet and shared a look. The kid banged her fist on her high chair. “But you almost lost your business,” Niijima said, softly enough that it didn’t carry to the kitchen, where Boss was spooning curry onto plates.

Ryuji hurried to help him. Whatever was being said couldn’t be something he was meant to overhear, even if the doctor continued in a voice that clearly said she didn’t care who overheard, “But I didn’t, did I? All’s well that end’s well, and all that.”

“But—” Niijima protested, the rest too low to hear over the clanking of spoons as Ryuji pulled out three and dug around for the toddler stuff. Boss swept past him to adjust the coffee brewers, and came back with a brow raised, as if to ask what the hell Ryuji was doing in his kitchen.

Ryuji shrugged, picked up a pair of plates, and headed back out to the table.

Haru really was as young as Niijima, up close. She smiled and thanked him for the food and there was that pang of recognition again, as if he’d seen her face in passing at least a dozen times.

He must have stared too long; Boss came out with the other plates, including the small one for the kid, just as Niijima said, “You don’t have to stare, Sakamoto.”

“Oh,” he said, jumping. One hand flew to the back of his head, where he scratched idly and added, “I just—you’re kinda familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it, and I might have thought Prez here was lying when she said she had friends, so, uh…”

“President!” Haru said. “I haven’t heard that in so long!”

“Haru used to be a part of the beautification committee at Shujin,” Niijima said. “She tended the flowerbeds out front and in the courtyard.”

“And I had a lovely garden on the rooftop,” Haru added, voice going wistful as her gaze drifted out the window. “I hated to leave it. I wonder how it’s doing.”

 _Badly_ , Ryuji thought. A garden on the roof? He’d be surprised if the teachers knew about it; he’d be surprised if anyone was going to haul gardening supplies up four flights of stairs to take care of it.

But, if she was Niijima’s age—and if he remembered right, the kid was just turning two—

Fuck, no. No, no, no. This was Niijima’s friend and real life, not some bad K-drama on TV. There was no way—he would have heard about it—

“You look surprised,” Doctor Goth said. Haru turned her attention to her plate and very carefully did not look anywhere else.

“It happens, Sakamoto,” Niijima said, feeding the kid a spoonful of curry. She could hold the spoon and almost get it to her mouth but wound up dropping more than she ate, and the other hand was already covered in curry and rice. She plopped it in her plate and picked up a fistful of food.

“Don’t mean it’s right,” he said, more aggressively than he meant to. Niijima’s friend. A two-year-old. No dad anywhere in sight and no ring on Haru’s finger—unless she was hiding it somewhere, like Yuuki had, because she was afraid of it or the implications or just wasn’t fucking happy.

If there was a ring at all.

Doctor Goth leaned back in her seat. Ryuji bit back the rest of what he wanted to say, could feel his face turning red from stopping himself, and stalked back over to his table. Boss brought him curry, because Boss was a big softy like that—and Ryuji might or might not have told him his ma wouldn’t be back until late tonight, so even if he went home there would be nobody to eat with, so maybe Boss was just keeping him company.

It was hard to tell. Ryuji just thanked him and dug in, listening to the idle chatter from the other table when Boss finally brought them their coffee. The kid got a cup of milk; Niijima shoved a straw from the diaper bag into it before letting her have it.

And _then_ he remembered he’d seen Haru and her daughter just days ago. He’d run around the courtyard of Yuuki’s apartment with the kid on his back while she pulled at his hair and tugged at his face and squealed with such delight that he couldn’t help but grin, and her mom had just stood off to the side and watched, weeding forgotten. She’d looked sad, watching them. Ryuji hadn’t had the guts to ask why, not with Yuuki stomping down the stairs ready to meet Yamada.

“I think it’s going to go well,” the doctor said at one point, answering some quiet question of Haru’s. “No matter what rumors they try to start, no one will be able to say that my medicines don’t work. Oyamada won’t like it, he’ll never like it, but that’s just because he’s incompetent.”

“But it was close,” Niijima said.

Doctor Goth nodded, taking a sip of her coffee. “Yes, it was,” she agreed, “and it always will be until those complaints get filed, and even then it won’t amount to anything, but you tried. That’s all I could have asked for.”

Niijima shook her head. “It’s not right.”

“It never is.”

Haru kept her silence throughout the whole thing. Maybe she was just naturally quiet, or maybe she was shy, or maybe—

Ah, no. No. He didn’t want to think about abusive husbands, or abusive boyfriends, or shitty abusive dads who beat their kids and girlfriends and wives into silent submission. He didn’t want to.

He wanted to think about how much it would suck to have to run home in the light rain that had begun falling. He wanted to think about how to deal with Yusuke and Yuuki and Yamada. Hell, he hadn’t been to Futaba’s in a while; maybe he should visit, see how she was doing after her friend left for who-knows-where, see if she had any more games for him to test.

People were shit, he thought instead, gripping his spoon so hard his knuckles turned white.

“In any case, I owe you this,” the doctor said, sliding her plate to one side. Boss got up to take it; she dug around in her pocket and came up with… something, hidden under the back of the booth and Niijima’s head. Haru leaned over to check it. “They’re all old colleagues of mine from medical school and… other places. Call around, see if any of them will help you. Circumstances willing, I know a few of them will.”

“But, this is—” Niijima started to say as Haru flipped a sheet of paper over.

“My part of our deal,” Doctor Goth finished, daring her to argue. “If my dear guinea pig goes above and beyond what I’ve asked of her, how can I not do the same? That said, the rest will be up to you, and I should warn you that some of them don’t speak a word of Japanese.”

“ _My English is very good_ ,” Haru said, and Ryuji’s ears pricked up at the other language. She was nearly as fluent as Ann and Wakaba were, if a little rustier with lack of practice. “Father always said it would be good to learn it for the time when the company expanded overseas. Mako is almost as good as I am, too.”

“Haru’s father dragged an American all the way here just to tutor her,” Niijima supplied, “while I’ve been told I still maintain that accent they dislike so much.”

“But,” Haru said, “will they really help us?”

“I’m sure they will,” Doctor Goth said, and Ryuji nearly scoffed. He’d heard that so many times from his ma that he knew it was the opposite: she wasn’t sure, she probably hadn’t even checked with half the people on her list before putting it together, and she was shoving the work onto Niijima and Haru.

He must have made a noise anyway; Doctor Goth glared at him over the rim of her coffee cup before setting that aside, too. “Many of them can sympathize with your situation,” she said. “Whether or not they can help, I can’t be sure, but there are a few lawyers in there. Asking them might be more prudent. I highlighted them for you.”

“Oh,” Niijima said.

Haru leaned back in her seat, staring down at her plate. “What do we do if none of them can help us? Mako, I…”

“I know,” Niijima said. “I know, but one of them has to know what we can do.”

Ryuji wasn’t sure if he should be watching this, as Niijima leaned over a bit—to take Haru’s hand, or to look her in the eye—as she said, “You said you’d rather run for the rest of your life, Haru. You said you don’t want his dirty hands all over Suzuna. You said—”

“I know what I said,” Haru said, refusing to look anywhere but at her plate. Boss shoved the volume from the TV up, until Ryuji had to strain his ears to hear her over the weather report: “But we also agreed that if no one can help us, I’ll have no choice but to stay here, with Suzuna. Maybe I’ll be able to keep her from growing up as I did. Father won’t dare to step on Sugimura’s toes—”

“You can’t,” Niijima insisted, throwing a look over her shoulder to Ryuji in his booth. He sunk down, scraping curry sauce and leftover grains of rice off his plate, wishing he was anywhere but here. “If you couldn’t fight them before, you won’t be able to now. We need to leave, find someplace and someone that will help you _and_ Suzuna. I want you to be happy, Haru. You’re not happy here.”

“But—they’ll come after us—”

“Then let them.” Niijima’s tone was pure steel, tempered and unyielding. “They’re selfish, Haru. They aren’t looking out for you or Suzuna or any of their employees; that’s how this all got started in the first place, remember, and look where it got your father. If they could, they’d ask—no, they would _order_ more from you. You know this, and you know that Suzuna doesn’t deserve to grow up like you did.”

Suzuna looked up every time her name was called, grinning toothily through the curry sauce smeared across her face. She kicked her feet in her high chair.

Haru stared at her. Ryuji wasn’t sure what was going on inside her head—it might have been mom stuff, the kind of thing Ryuji’s ma had thought years and years ago and ultimately tossed because she’d believed things could get better: that she had to leave the scumbag she’d married, that Ryuji didn’t deserve to grow up raised by him, that she had to protect her son—

(She’d stayed because she was still stupidly in love, and her husband wasn’t that bad yet, he’d snap out of it sooner or later and then they could all be a happy family and besides, no one looked too kindly on young single mothers, could she deal with the gossip, could her son deal with the gossip and the teasing and the _looks_ —)

Finally, Haru blinked. “Okay,” she said.

“You’re sure?” Niijima asked.

“No,” she said. “I—I don’t believe I ever will be. Sugimura can and will make our lives a living hell, Mako. He’s powerful enough to do that, and I’m not a fool who thinks he won’t. But if we leave, Suzuna will want to meet him some day. She’ll want to know who her father is, what kind of person he is. There’s every chance she won’t believe me when I tell her and she’ll come running back here to see him and then I’ll lose her. He’ll keep her here. He’ll try to tell her I took her away from him because I’m cruel, and she won’t know otherwise until it’s too late.”

Niijima turned to look at the kid, chewing once more on her hand. Haru was right, at least—that big-eyed kid would want to know her dad at some point, and she wouldn’t take _He’s a shitbag, Suzuna_ as an answer. Not until she was dodging beer bottles and fists and whatever else her dad would throw at her—and by then it would be too late. Her dad would have his hands wrapped around her throat and he would never let go.

“Then we’ll just have to raise her to not want a father,” Niijima said, wiping up the sauce from Suzuna’s cheek. “As long as she’s happy, she won’t want to come back and find him.”

“Mako,” Haru said.

“I know it’s wishful thinking. We want to think the best of everyone, and one day that will include Suzuna, too. But we have to _try_ , Haru. We have to try.”

“Yes, I know,” Haru said, dabbing at her eyes with a napkin.

Ryuji took his plate to the sink and let the water run over whatever Niijima said next. Niijima was leaving the country, and she was taking Haru and Suzuna with her. Niijima had worked and worked to save up enough for however much that was going to cost, all on her own. Niijima had toiled at getting the connections she would need to effectively disappear once they were gone; no wonder he’d spotted her coming out of that sketchy back alley in Shibuya. Sketchy back alleys were where the really good deals could be made.

What had she given up to get this far? Could Ryuji ever do the same thing?

“Here,” Boss said, setting down the last of the plates from the table and an empty coffee cup.

“Sure thing,” Ryuji said, tugging on gloves. He liked his hands the way they were, not all wrinkled and pruny from too much water. Shit felt weird when they got like that.

He was so absorbed in washing whatever Boss brought over—the toddler’s plate, the cup of milk, another coffee cup—that he was surprised when he turned around next to find Niijima and her friend gone, Doctor Goth the only one left at the table, nursing another steaming cup of coffee.

“How’s your friend?” she asked, and he vaguely recalled her asking that before. “Still good?”

Yeah, he wanted to say, but that would be a lie. Yuuki wasn’t good. Yuuki had gone to a mixer and did stupid shit he would regret for the next five or ten years and was probably working himself up over Yamada and Akira and Yusuke.

But he had still gone straight to Ryuji after, instead of wallowing about it. He had admitted he needed somebody. He had trusted Ryuji enough to take him when he went to see Yamada—trusted him enough to keep him from doing something else stupid, as if Ryuji was any good at that—and wasn’t trying to shut them all out anymore. He was trying to be better, even if it wasn’t working some of the time.

“Kinda,” Ryuji settled on. “He’s in college, he misses his boyfriend—you know, all that kinda junk.”

Doctor Goth gave him a piercing stare, as if she was trying to see straight through him. He thought that maybe she could read minds, but that was stupid—she was probably just really good at reading people, or at waiting them out to see if they cracked and blabbed everything on their own.

And, well. She had helped Yuuki before. She probably just didn’t want to see him as a patient again. “He’s talking to me more. About what’s going on, and why he thinks he’s doing what he is. I don’t get half of that stuff, but it’s gotta help, right?”

She gave that curling smile, proud and satisfied. “Right,” she said, and said nothing more.

Ryuji picked up his bag and braved the rain.


	20. Summer Vacation, The Second Friday, Morning

Yusuke woke to rain on his window.

During his time with Madarame he would have lamented the lack of sunlight—the lights at the atelier were always off-color, too brown or orange or golden to produce works that would look well on the decently-lit wall of a gallery, or worse, in someone’s home—but today he sighed and laid under the covers for a few extra minutes.

It was very different from a hug, but there was no person to potentially embarrass with his unusual clinginess, so he took what comfort he could get.

It was also early. Too early for breakfast, and too early to be waking Nakanohara by trying to cook, and any food he made would be cold by the time Nakanohara was awake. There was no point in getting up except to use the bathroom, and Yusuke did so with a reluctance he remembered feeling when he first arrived at the rehab center: as if there was no point in doing so simply because he couldn’t paint anymore.

That was—well, it was bad, but he recognized it as such as he crawled back under his covers. It was bad but it was normal, and he should have been glad that at least one thing in his life was.

He also knew that he wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of his days in bed, snacking on potato sticks and water and lamenting the loss of the love of his life. There would be other loves for Yusuke to pursue, but none of them would rival Yuuki. None of them.

Yuuki was his first, and firsts were special.

(Or, they were supposed to be special. Yusuke wasn’t sure if that kiss in the alley was Yuuki’s first or not, but if it was he was oddly eager to give it away. Perhaps some people were just like that.)

He sighed. It didn’t hurt so much to think about him anymore, but it still ached. One day he would be able to think on it without his very being rejecting the idea of Yuuki loving someone else, but until then…

Until then he had his bed and Nakanohara and food and his sketchbooks. Madarame wasn’t gnawing at his mind lately, either, which was a relief. He was always there when Yusuke didn’t need him to be, whispering words and hissing complaints and crying and begging and pleading.

Yusuke was sick of the old man ruling over him even from the depths of a jail cell—even when Yusuke hadn’t spoken to him in two years and never planned to speak to him again.

“Enough,” he told himself, though murmured into his sheets it didn’t sound nearly as forceful as he would’ve liked. If he was going to lie in bed avoiding his friends, the least he could do was check on Akira. If he was feeling better, they could make the jump through space-time again to that other world and come ever closer to the end.

… Whatever that end was.

He grabbed his phone off to the floor—no messages, not even from Futaba or Togo—and burrowed even further into his blankets as he activated the app and walked the robot over to the restaurant.

What greeted him was an ordered chaos: Akira was awake in Delta’s room, but he had gotten more flushed with fever overnight, to the point where Delta’s clumsy attempts to keep him cool weren’t enough anymore. Ren was there in his place, trying to encourage Akira to eat some rice gruel—stains on the sheets indicated that the chicken soup had dripped everywhere when Akira pushed it away as he did the gruel now, though it wasn’t with much strength.

If he wasn’t even eating, it had to be serious.

Ren huffed, plopping the spoon back into the bowl. _“You need to eat,”_ he said.

 _“_ _Not hungry,”_ Akira wheezed.

_“_ _Even if you’re not, you need. To. Eat.”_

**He’s right** , Yusuke picked.

_“_ _Oh, good, you’re here. Talk some sense into him for me; I’ve got to go check on the restaurant.”_

Ren didn’t wait for a response, turning and stomping out the door, leaving the bowl behind.

**Yuuki would want you to eat.**

Akira groaned. _“Are you saying that,”_ he panted, _“because you think it’ll make me do it?”_

**Did it work?**

Akira groaned again, flopping his hand out of the covers to search blindly for the bowl. Yusuke pushed it towards him as delicately as he could and watched him eat a spoonful—then two—then a third. Then he grimaced and let the spoon fall.

Yusukue tried in vain to pick it up, if only for something to do as Akira curled back up and stared absently at the posters on the wall.

 _“_ _You know,”_ he said, after a long while where Yusuke was nearly lulled back to sleep himself, _“I’m so… tired. Just so tired. I don’t want to be this… person anymore. This person. Ionasal.”_

He went quiet for so long Yusuke thought he drifted off. Then he said, _“But how can I tell them that—that I don’t want to be Ionasal anymore? Why does Ren get to choose his name, but I have to be stuck with this one? Yuuki never called me by it, did he?”_

 **He didn’t** , although Yusuke couldn’t be sure. All he knew was that by the time Yuuki was willing to talk about it, _Akira_ was the only name he called the boy on the other side of the screen.

 _“_ _It’s not fair.”_ Akira sniffed. _“It’s not fair. If—if I could tell them—if I could trust them—”_

**You don’t trust them?**

He sniffed again. Was he crying underneath his sheets? Should Yusuke do something about it? _Could_ he? _“_ _Not with this. Not with Yuuki. They won’t understand; I know they won’t. You do, but you know Yuuki. That’s different.”_

**They’ll understand if you explain it to them.**

_“_ _And if they don’t?”_

**They still need you.**

_“_ _And if I need them to go home once this is all over with?”_

Yusuke couldn’t foresee the group in the restaurant ever deciding to forsake Akira, despite all the horrors they had inflicted on him since his arrival. They felt too guilty for the past to let something as simple as who Akira wanted to be and who he loved stop them from doing the right thing; they were trying to atone for it every day, and the wish to send Akira and Goro home was a true one. It would be the least they could do for their saviors, even if Goro had been causing so many problems.

**They won’t abandon you.**

Akira grunted something unintelligible into his sheets. He had to clear his throat several times before repeating himself. _“You don’t know that. You don’t know what people are capable of. One wrong move, one single mistake, and they’ll drop you like you’re rotten,_ _l_ _ike you’re shit on the bottom of their shoe. If they do that I won’t have anyone here; even Goro will hate me for not keeping my promise. I_ can’t _.”_

That was fair, Yusuke thought. Akira had been abandoned by his own parents after his arrest, and largely friendless due to his reputation as a troublemaker. Ryuji had come back from visiting Akira’s hometown scowling at the rumors that he was a delinquent, that he extorted tourists, that he had fallen in with the wrong crowd. Yusuke hadn’t quite wondered what kind of crowd could be _wrong_ , before, but he knew better now.

 **I know more than you think** , he picked. He had Madarame to thank for that; a lifetime of being raised and groomed to give everything he created to the man he thought of as a father, up to and including his own life—Yusuke knew very well what people were capable of. The duplicity of Madarame’s act hadn’t been lost on him, and he could see it in every person, now, including his own friends.

Including himself.

 **And I know they won’t abandon you** , he went on. **They haven’t yet, have they?**

 _“_ _This is different,”_ Akira protested. _“This is—it’s Yuuki. Even if they accept that I don’t want to be Ionasal anymore, how will they understand him?”_

 **Because he’s important to you.** If there was one thing Ra Cielans understood, it was having someone dear to you, someone important enough to keep by your side.

Or, at the very least, it was something Akira’s friends would understand. The blue-haired one, Sarly, had to have come to that conclusion by now—if she had the ability to help Yuuki help Akira regain his lost memories, then she had to have the ability to peek in every so often and check how the recovery was going. She had to, because tossing bandages at an unconscious body with a serious wound wouldn’t matter unless there was someone else there to help. She had to know there was someone helping Akira—and had to question Akira’s unwillingness to talk about it.

It was odd behavior from someone who should have been grateful.

 _“_ _I can’t believe that. I just… can’t,”_ Akira said, then made a noise. _“Unless—I didn’t think you’d understand, either, but you do. And I only thought that after—”_

After the Dive with Morgana, when Yusuke had had the choice to reveal his knowledge about Yuuki. They hadn’t had much of a chance to talk about it, but—

**You can’t Dive in your condition.**

_“_ _What’ll you do if we don’t, and this worry eats me alive?”_

**You asked me not to go farther.**

_“_ _Well, I_ need _you to!”_ A hand shot out from under the covers, gripping at the robot’s arm. Akira’s eyes were half-shut in exertion as he tried to haul himself out of bed. _“If I can’t trust them with this, it might affect my ability to save them. I have to—I have to try—”_

A knock on his door startled him. Nakanohara asked, “Yusuke? Are you up? Breakfast is almost done.”

Was it that late already? He had no sense of time while using the app, and he’d thought Akira had paused for only a few seconds at a time, but…

“Yes, of course,” he said. “I’ll be right out.”

 **Right now, you need to eat. Get some rest. Let me think on it** , he chose in quick succession, and left only when Akira gave weak agreement, app left open just in case Akira thought he couldn’t eat if he wasn’t being watched.

“You’re up awfully late,” Nakanohara said, once he was at the table. Rice and fried eggs and a small side salad Yusuke had to make himself pick through.

Lettuce. What a waste of nutrition.

“I suppose I am,” he replied. “Although I thought I woke up early. I must have dozed off again at some point.”

“Your break is almost over. You’d best be careful about sleeping too much.”

“I will.”

Silence, save for Nakanohara’s humming. It gave Yusuke time to think: should he go through with the Dive despite the dangers to Akira’s health, or should he wait for Akira’s cold to subside? Would waiting even help, or would Akira only get worse as time progressed, until—

Until either he died from the fever or the god gorging itself on the souls aboard the Soreil consumed everything. Goro would be lost for good, then, absorbed as he was to be one of the god’s eyes overlooking the universe.

And Yusuke couldn’t simply neglect Akira’s wishes. If he wanted to Dive—if he needed courage to say the things he desperately wanted to say—well, it was Yusuke’s job to help him, regardless of whether or not it was a very good idea. They were on a time crunch. Every second counted—which was why he was so conflicted. Diving meant risking Akira’s health and quite possibly his life; not Diving meant risking Akira’s health and quite possibly his life; both meant risking the remaining populace of the Soreil as well as the future of Ra Ciela.

But, if Diving could help—if it could give them even a slighter chance—if it made the bonds between Akira and his friends even a bit stronger—it would be worth it, wouldn’t it?

No, that wasn’t quite all of it. Yusuke just couldn’t sit back and watch Akira suffer through this anxious fever, not after spending the last year doing just that. Yusuke had worried for so long over what his friends would think of him loving Yuuki that he’d been too afraid to say it, and then Ann had gone and seen right through him. Ryuji knew but wasn’t judging, despite all of Yusuke’s worries.

… Well, Ryuji wasn’t judging Yusuke’s love but his terrible tact, and it had been an awful choice of words—not even the still-aching sting of rejection could excuse what he said, and justifying it later had felt exactly like cobbling together an art project at three in the morning the day it was due with a fever.

(His teacher had been very disappointed in that piece, until he saw Yusuke’s glassy eyes and his flushed cheeks and put two and two together. Yusuke had been ten and foolish, believing he wasn’t an artist if he couldn’t work through a simple fever.)

He helped Nakanohara wash the dishes once the meal was done, and saw him off at the door minutes later. Yes, he was going to eat lunch. Perhaps he would go for a walk at the park or around the block; Nakanohara nodded at the plans as if Yusuke wasn’t stating them just to have an excuse to get out of the apartment and away from Akira for a few more hours to give him some more time to rest.

Yusuke watched him go, wondering what he would have to do to get anyone to disbelieve his lies. What would he have to do, to avoid sitting in an empty apartment all day, with no company save for Akira, sick as a dog in another dimension?

Oh, that was it: he was lonely. Like those nights in the atelier after everyone had left and there wasn’t the familiar rustling of futons and blankets and hair fanned about pillows to lull him to sleep anymore, just the crushing emptiness of the building around him, its creaks and groans and the whistle of wind through the siding hidden behind nothing at last. At times he had thought he could hear Madarame snoring distantly in some other room, but knew better than to disrupt his rest lest it cause more artist’s blocks and more work for Yusuke.

He was… lonely, and jealous: Akira had a whole cadre of friends by his side, and he didn’t trust a single one of them with the truth of his soul.

That had to change, but could Yusuke manage to do it? Yusuke, who was keeping secrets from his own friends, who couldn’t even tell Yuuki he loved him, who let the prejudices Madarame had drilled into him affect his relationships—could he do what he couldn’t for himself?

It wasn’t as if this was a trick to make him feel guilty enough to speak up and—as Ryuji would say, even if the thought made him recall Amano and the bloodstained bathroom—spill his guts. Akira might know something was going on but no one could fake a fever as severe as his, so it was safe to say that he wasn’t trying to force Yusuke into anything except the Dive.

He paced. Where there would usually be bright squares of light on the floor in the living room was now gray and plain, the rain an inconsistent beat upon the windows. He could still go for a walk as long as he took an umbrella along; in this weather no one would be out unless they had to be, and Yusuke could, perhaps, sketch that family of ducks frolicking in the lake in the absence of swan boats. It would certainly be better than staying here and listening to Akira plead with him.

And that was what he did, telling Akira that he would Dive only if the bowl of rice gruel was finished when he came back. Akira stared at him for a few moments before giving a devious smirk that made Yusuke wary.

Kanon agreed to watch him for the rest of the morning, and Akira slumped back into bed with a pout that told Yusuke that yes, he had been planning on doing something with the rice gruel to make it disappear, then claim to have eaten it.

Yusuke sighed at his antics. He thought Akira had a better head on his shoulders than to resort to cheap tricks to get what he wanted; apparently he was wrong. Akira was no different from any other teenage boy in the world, believing that his pain wasn’t crippling enough to stop and fret over, that there was no need for all the fuss everyone was making just because he was a little dizzy and ignoring that he was having a hard time just speaking and standing; how was he going to Sing, much less walk for miles and endure a trip through space-time?

He wasn’t, and the only one he was fooling was himself.

Yusuke wanted to see if he tried anything under Kanon’s stern watch, and swore to take his time coming home.

* * *

Yuuki’s phone buzzed in his pocket halfway through plating a scoop of rice; Leblanc’s lunch crowd was the same regulars as always even on the last few days of summer vacation, and Futaba was waiting patiently upstairs, too drained to deal with people—especially the bored, slightly nosy elders who had nothing better to do than gossip their retirements away. If they asked her how she was doing, she said as she pushed him down the stairs, she would _die_.

He’d laughed and dug drinks out of the fridge—soda for him, some kind of organic mango-lime juice for her—said hello to Mrs. Egawa when she greeted him, her surly husband glowering at the TV. The man never smiled, and Yuuki knew it was the bite of age that kept the frown on his face, the wish for things to be better and simpler like they used to be, if his comments at the stories were anything to go by.

Yuuki wasn’t sure there was ever a better, simpler time. It just looked that way when you were young and stupid and optimistic—and in love, as Mrs. Egawa turned back to her husband and made some remark that lightened that scowl just for a moment—and when you didn’t know the terrible things people really thought about you.

He wasn’t sure if he should confront Yusuke about it. He wasn’t even sure if Yusuke ever wanted to see him again; except for Ryuji and Futaba, no one had seen or talked to him in almost a week. If it was just artist stuff like Ryuji said then that would be one thing, but it didn’t explain why he wasn’t responding to Futaba’s texts.

Yuuki would understand it if Yusuke ignored him, but Futaba? Why?

Was he—was he really that unnerved by the kiss, so unnerved that he didn’t want anything to do with the rest of his friends? It couldn’t be; Yusuke wasn’t _that_ stuffy.

“Afternoon,” Boss said as the door chimed. Yuuki finished serving up their lunches and was ready to maneuver it all upstairs when Segawa moved into view, reading the menu hanging over the bar counter.

She noticed him at the same time he noticed Yamada at her side and nearly dropped his plates.

“Back again?” Boss asked, moving to cover him as he swung around, curry inching closer to the edge of the plate than he liked. The last thing he needed was to burn his hand on curry sauce, of all things.

“Yes!” Segawa chirped, and he could feel her trying to catch another glimpse of him. The sharp gasp had to be Yamada, glancing from the menu to see what the fuss was about.

So did the barely audible, “Mishima?”

He ducked his head. There was no point if they’d seen him, but he couldn’t turn around and face them, either.

Well, he had said he wanted to be their friend. It would be weird if he just up and ignored them the way Yusuke was Futaba, and he wanted to be better. Less anxious about being seen in public by the people he knew and more… anything. Anything would be good right now. Anything would be better than standing here letting his and Futaba’s lunch get cold because he was too much of a coward to face them.

And Akira would want him to, he thought. Akira would be happy to hear about Yuuki making new friends; he would probably joke about Yuuki making his own Imperial Council someday, and while the thought was nice it was also next to impossible. Yuuki could barely handle having three friends—six if he counted Boss and Takamaki and Suzui, maybe seven if his dad counted, which he probably didn’t—and—

Okay, well, maybe having seven friends wasn’t as much of a stretch as he thought it was.

He sighed. “They can sit with us upstairs,” he offered, as Boss tried to coax the pair into a booth. “They’re friends of mine. I’ll just let Futaba know.”

Every pair of eyes in the cafe was trained on him as he manhandled the plates and drinks up the stairs. Futaba was still sitting in her chair, phone pressed to her ear.

“You took too long,” she muttered, eyes wide at the thought of strangers up here in their little haven. _Her_ little haven, really, but if Yamada was going to blurt anything out Yuuki didn’t want the Egawas or Boss to hear it—and if she knew that he noticed how on-edge she was, she didn’t say it, just grabbed for her plate and drink and plopped them right on top of her composition homework.

“Sorry,” he said.

“It’s fine.” She made to drop the phone in her bag, then thought better of it, setting it next to her textbook. “They’re fine. I’ll be—I’ll be fine. And if they bother me I’ll just watch some Featherman videos on my phone.”

“You sure?”

She nodded, plugging her headphones in, ready to bolt to the safety of Featherman. Yuuki wasn’t convinced, but she was trying, too, in her own way. That had to count for something.

He went back downstairs to find Segawa and Yamada still standing at the counter, plates of curry waiting at the bar. He grabbed them drinks out of the fridge while Boss entertained some question of Mrs. Egawa and herded the two upstairs.

In the minute or so since he’d left, Futaba managed to down half her plate and was shoving another spoonful in when he returned. She was turning green with nausea and nerves, and reached for her drink, turning it around in her hands to avoid having to look too long at the strangers. She’d moved her books and papers over, though, leaving room for Yuuki to slide into the seat next to her; Segawa and Yamada glanced at each other, then at the bench on the other side of the table.

“Are you sure this is alright?” Segawa asked.

“It’s fine,” Yuuki and Futaba said, at nearly the same time. Futaba ducked her head; Yuuki went on, “As long as you pay, it’s okay. Boss—um, Mr. Sakura—he always complains about rowdy teens down in the cafe, and unless we get really loud no one will know we’re up here.”

“Boss?” Yamada asked as they set their plates down. “You work here, Mishima?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, and tried to will himself to eat. It was hard to, with his stomach in knots and Futaba fidgeting with her drink. “I—uh, I tutor Futaba here too. We were working on her composition homework before we broke for lunch.”

“He’ll need you later,” Futaba reminded him, and he sighed. Friday nights weren’t as bad as Saturdays, but the dinner crowd was still large enough that Boss struggled on his own. The extra set of hands freed him up to take orders and brew coffee; the most Yuuki ever did was plate curry and wash dishes. That was fine, though. No one ever expected the busboy to make small talk.

“I know,” he said, then muttered a thanks for the food and dug in. Segawa’s thanks was a little brighter, and Yamada didn’t make one at all.

Weird, he thought, but ignored it to remember how to chew and swallow without choking.

“See?” Segawa asked at some point. “Isn’t it good, Yamada?”

Yamada nodded, mouth too full to answer.

“He’s never had curry before,” Segawa said. Futaba sputtered and coughed and then gulped down her juice in an attempt to play it as if some rice went down the wrong pipe.

“I just don’t see what’s so great about it,” Yamada said.

Futaba sputtered some more. Before she could start waxing poetic about the delicate combination of spices that went into every pot Boss made, Yuuki said, “That’s odd. Your mom never made it for you?”

“She wasn’t very fond of cooking,” Yamada said, poking at his rice. “And, um, she was never home, either. I ate dinner with my cousins down the street until I was old enough to buy my own food. Mom said she got tired of paying my aunt to babysit me when I was perfectly capable of doing it myself.”

He got this look on his face, then, a mixture of despair and loathing. “I thought she hated me. Turned out she just hated my dad for dragging her to America; she divorced him a couple years later and moved back here. She said I had to come with her, because I was a citizen. I didn’t know any better.”

“She tricked you,” Segawa said, lips going tight as she tried to keep from saying any more.

“I was fourteen and people at school kept asking me if I knew Chinese and I was tired of explaining that I didn’t because my mom was from Japan. Mom didn’t have any family there, and Dad’s side of the family just seemed to tolerate me, so I wasn’t close with any of them, either.” He shrugged. “I thought it wouldn’t be so bad, moving here. Turns out it’s just the same."

“But worse,” Futaba guessed, staring at a lock of her hair that had fallen over her shoulder.

“Yeah,” Yamada agreed, putting his spoon down. “It is. But I—I wanted to apologize, in advance. I did something I shouldn’t have and now you’re going to get dragged into it, Mishima.”

Should he ask? Should he dare to mention last Saturday and the disastrous results in front of Futaba, who would eat it up faster than her curry and beg for more?

He—he probably should. Definitely should. “For what?” Yuuki asked.

And Yamada laid out the weirdest, most nerve-wracking set of coincidences Yuuki had ever heard of. Yamamoto was a classmate from his former high school where he’d been bullied for three years straight; she got a weird app on her phone and became obsessed with the characters in it. When the mystery of it all finally annoyed her, she and a bunch of other obsessed players made an online group to find the guy who made it, since no one knew who the developer was.

Yuuki shivered. The rings in his hand were warm and slick with palm-sweat from the heat. Futaba bumped his shoulder with hers. The food they’d been eating lay forgotten, save for Segawa, who was eating with a dogged resolution.

“They started looking up every Yuuki they could find,” Yamada said, “and when she found out I was in the same class as you, she told me I had to help her find out if you were the one that guy was calling. She said if I managed to do it she’d date me, or hook me up with one of her girl friends, and I—I said yes. Then she said if I didn’t or backed out—well, that I’d know what would happen.”

“Awful,” Segawa murmured to her plate. “I knew it.”

And he hadn’t been able to say no in the first place because he knew what kind of person she was, Yuuki guessed. He knew what kind of rumors she would spread and how easily they would take among his new classmates and—

And he’d wanted a fresh start. A big college in Tokyo, where no one would know him, where he could make friends for the first time in his life. Then he’d seen Mishima, sitting by his lonesome; then Yamamoto had confronted him and shoved those long years of loneliness back in his face; then he’d been too much of a coward to say no to whatever she wanted.

“That’s why I’m sorry,” Yamada said, bowing over the table. “You were suspicious but I forced myself on you and—I’m sorry. I told her I wanted out last night, and she blew up. The whole school is going to know by the time we get back.”

“Know what?” Futaba asked.

“Whatever she wants them to believe.” Segawa set her spoon down, finally finished. “I told Mishima this, but, the things she said at the mixer when you two were gone weren’t… nice,” she said, picking her words carefully because Futaba was there.

Seagawa had never seen Futaba’s room. She probably had a dirtier mind than Yamamoto, and definitely had the skills to make it stick.

“That’s why I wanted to apologize,” Yamada said. “I was trying to message you all morning, but you never answered, and then Segawa suggested this cafe. She said it was quiet and out of the way and that we could talk it all out here.”

“Talk what out?” Futaba asked, the jerk of her shoulders telling Yuuki how badly she wanted to roll her eyes. “Talk about how you let some old bully of yours walk all over you some more? Talk about how you dragged Nishima into this? Is it _his_ fault you couldn’t say no?”

“It’s not, but,” Yamada said. He wouldn’t look up from the table; he kept fiddling with his spoon. “Even if I did say no, and Yamamoto spread whatever rumor she liked, she could have gotten someone else to do it. She would have found someone else just as desperate for a girlfriend and then they’d be the one following Mishima around.”

And they’d be the one Yuuki kissed in back alleys, and they’d probably give him the punch he had been waiting for, and then he’d never know that Yusuke hated that part of him. They would probably still be friends, still be talking.

“Don’t blame him, Futaba,” Yuuki said. “It’s—it’s hard, seeing your old bullies and trying to fight back when you know what they can do to you. I, uh, I’m guessing what you want to talk about is how we’re going to deal with it all.”

“Whatever Yamamoto spreads isn’t going to be pretty. She’s going to drag us through the mud—or at least, she’s going to try to,” Yamada said. “Segawa’s been contacting everyone from the mixer to help cull any rumors before they get out of hand. People, uh, might think you puked on my shoes.”

“The problem is that we’re both betting that she’ll use Kitagawa’s silence as confirmation of her rumors,” Segawa said. “If he can’t or won’t tell anyone what he saw when he went after you two, then any damage control we try will just look like a cover-up. It’ll make people believe that she’s right.”

But she was, Yuuki wanted to say as Yamada dragged a spoonful of cold curry to his mouth. She was, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? She was right, or partly right, and Yamada was only doing this to save poor victim Yuuki Mishima from being slandered.

“But Inari hates puke,” Futaba said.

“Most people hate puke,” Segawa said, “but most people don’t come back to a party pale and sweating just from seeing it. He barely talked to anyone after; that’s what made her say most of the… other things she said.”

Futaba dragged her feet up onto the couch and crouched on the balls of her feet, brow furrowed. “But he _hates_ it hates it,” she said, which didn’t explain much. “One time at the—uh, school—one of the other—students—threw up in the middle of—um, class. He got all pale and shaky then, too. I might have found out later that when somebody pukes he thinks they’re going to die.”

Segawa, after a moment of silence where Yamada seemed to be reconsidering swallowing his mouthful of curry, said, “Oh.”

“ _Unless_ that’s all a big cover-up and he’s got a different reason to be freaked out, yeah,” Futaba said, and Yuuki heard the grinning, evil mastermind that was Medjed as she went on, “He’s kind of a prude, so if he saw something naughty he’d probably get flustered like this anyway. Did he?”

Yamada paled. Yuuki sighed; Segawa frowned a bit, thinking that her master plan to exonerate them was going to waste.

He was kind of tired of holding onto it. Ryuji knew and Yusuke knew; there was no reason to keep Futaba out of the loop, either. Not after ignoring her for so long.

“I thought there was something going on and that was why Yamada kept inviting me out,” Yuuki said. “Turns out I was right, but not before trying to scare him off by—uh. Futaba, don’t look at me like that, please.”

She was side-eyeing him, snickering. “Akira’s going to be _so_ pissed when he finds out. He’ll give _you_ the cold shoulder this time. See how you like it, you nerd.”

“It’s my fault,” Yamada said. “I’m the one who—uh, you know.”

“I don’t know, I’m just guessing!” Futaba crowed. “This is just like all those enemies-to-lovers doujins! Give me the deets! How much did Nishima cry? Was he any good? Who started it?”

“Why would I cry,” Yuuki mumbled to the table, feeling the hot well of tears betray him.

“Why wouldn’t you cry,” Futaba shot back, shoving an elbow into his ribs. “I’ll yell at you later; right now I just wanna know the deets, so gimme. Like: why would this Yama-yugi send the both of you off and then start a rumor—unless she was just gonna betray the dumbass over here from the start?”

“That’s, um,” Yamada said, growing even paler. Had it not occurred to him that the way Yamamoto had insisted was specifically so she could spread rumors, or— “That’s because she wanted me to snoop through his room. For evidence. Which I—how was I supposed to get it if Mishima was there, watching me? What was I supposed to do if he turned me away as soon as we got to the building?”

“You said it was her and some online friends, right?” Yamada nodded. “So, what’re the chances she has one online buddy who lives in Tokyo and can pick locks? It’s not exactly a hard skill to learn. After that, it would just be a question of whether you fulfilled your end of the bargain.”

“He would have, but…” Segawa said.

“She never intended to keep her word,” Futaba said.

“I know,” Yamada said, gritting his teeth. “I know that. I just—”

“You couldn’t help it,” Yuuki said. That was just what you did when you saw someone stronger than you: you did what they wanted because otherwise you would get hurt. It didn’t matter how.

And—breaking into someone’s house over a character in a game? What the hell?

How deranged were these people?

“But I—I don’t have to worry about somebody actually doing that, do I?” he asked, just to be sure. If Futaba had beefed up his website’s security, she’d probably made him unfindable, too.

“Only if they’re actual robbers,” she said, and—yeah, he’d have to start hiding the rings again, wouldn’t he? Yuuki could already see himself getting mugged on the streets by a bunch of gangsters looking for quick, easy cash. He was surprised it hadn’t happened already, but it had only been a week since he’d started wearing them over his shirt, on display for customers and strangers alike.

No one asked, not even Mrs. Egawa downstairs. Maybe Boss had told them not to.

Yuuki should really find a way to thank him.

“The problem,” Futaba said, “is that you all think you can beat her at her own game. She’s ten times better than you. She’s probably been laying out groundwork since before she asked dumbass over here to do her dirty work. You lost before she ever said a word.”

“What do we do, then?” Segawa asked as Yamada hung his head.

Futaba shrugged. “Beats me. Anything you say isn’t going to do you any good. The story’s too complicated for that.”

And people were more likely to believe something scandalous than the boring truth any day, Yuuki knew. Rumors went around and got worse with each telling; that was just the way things were. Even if he stepped up and admitted that he was the one who made the website—that he was the Yuuki they were looking for—would it even do him any good, at this point? Would it change anything?

It wouldn’t. He would still be hated for winning Akira’s heart before anyone else. He would still be hounded on the forum for more information, more data, more everything, because he was the most knowledgeable about Ra Ciela, even though his information was only secondhand. There would still be people who wanted to go there, to try and make a better life for themselves than here, where they were miserable—

 _Oh_ , he thought. It was that simple.

“Hey, Futaba,” he said. “How easy would it be for you to, uh, alter someone’s browsing history?”

“You tell me,” she deadpanned.

“Why would you want to do that?” Segawa asked.

“There’s this cult online,” he explained, and Futaba got this glint in her eye the more he talked. It might be the same glint she got a year ago, when she had Ryuji stole his phone. “The—the world inside the game, it’s—um, it’s real, and they want to go there. I think their website said they want to experience an isekai for real, but I didn’t look at it much.”

Futaba, typing away on her phone exclaimed: “Huh, it _is_ real!”

“But it’s a game, isn’t it?” Yamada asked.

“It’s stupid complicated,” Futaba said.

“I never understood it before, and I still don’t,” Yuuki said. He tried not to look at the webpage, not even out of the corner of his eye. The thing made his skin crawl. “And—I really don’t understand why people would want to go there after the things they did to—”

“Mishima,” Segawa said slowly, after he broke off. “You know about this game?”

“It’s not a game,” he said. Futaba slowed her typing just enough to look at him, as if to ask if he was sure.

How could he not be sure? He’d already outed himself to a reporter. Telling Yamada and Segawa, who only wanted to help, that should be easier, right?

“It’s not a game,” he said again. “It just looks like it. That’s how it looked to me, too, but it was real. They’re all real. They’re all real and they’re hurting and they need help and I couldn’t—couldn’t do it on my own. If I could have, I would have, and none of this would have happened.”

“So, you’re—you’re Yuuki,” Yamada said.

“Yeah.”

“ _That_ Yuuki.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, because it seemed to be the only thing to say. Yamada was trying to help him and he didn’t even realize that the person he’d been looking for—the person half of Japan, it felt like, wanted to find—had been sitting in front of him the whole time.

Yamada covered his face with his hands, breathed—and began to laugh.

“Yamada?” Segawa asked, concerned.

“I-I just,” he said, laughing all the while, “it’s funny, isn’t it? The game’s not a game. The people in it are real. Yamamoto practically blackmailed me into investigating Mishima, and it turns out he’s exactly the person she was looking for? _And_ he’s—he’s got to be dating that guy she’s so obsessed with? I can’t call that a coincidence. Nobody can.”

“Maybe not, but,” Yuuki said, “could you stop laughing? This is why I didn’t want to tell anyone.”

“Because it’s complicated, or because you think no one can believe that you’ve got a boyfriend?” Futaba asked, and jammed her elbow in his ribs again. She had scooted over and was close enough to rest on his arm, her jacket sweltering in the attic’s heat.

“Um,” he said, fingernail picking at the gemstones in his ring. “Both.”

He’d already said as much to Ryuji, after all. Who would believe a scrawny nobody like Yuuki could have a boyfriend as handsome as Akira? Who would believe they met through a weird app that was a window across dimensions?

Nobody, that was who; the ideas were so outlandish that even he had trouble believing them sometimes, and Akira had been right there, on the other side of his phone screen, lonely and scared and hurting and _real_.

Yamada’s giggles petered out as Futaba glared at Yuuki through the reflection in her phone. Segawa sipped her drink and said, “I’d date you, Mishima. You can make curry,” with such a straight face that even Futaba looked up in wonder. She was serious, too, if her claims at the mixer of not being able to cook were anything to go by.

“I would, too,” Yamada said. “After Saturday, I—I might have thought it’d be nice, if I could. That I’d give it a try. But you said you had a boyfriend, and then I started thinking that he was a pretty lucky guy and didn’t know what he was missing.

“He’s not… actually sick, is he? Your boyfriend. He’s actually in that—that weird app. That’s why you said he was overseas.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said, ignoring everything else that had been said. It was easier not to think about it; he still had class with Yamada to endure.

“And, with that, I’m outta here,” Futaba said, leaping off the couch. She moved her plate to one side and shoved her books and papers in her bag. “Before everything gets super mushy and you try to tiptoe around it like I’m not seventeen, not because of, you know, you guys. We’ll finish my homework later and I’ll grill Nishima for deets then.”

“But—” Segawa said.

“No buts! I’ve got a reputation to ruin.”

She grinned on her way down the stairs.

“Um,” Segawa said. “Should I leave too?”

“Please, don’t,” Yuuki said, at the same time Yamada said, “No, don’t.”

They looked at each other, then looked away. How was Yuuki supposed to look him in the eye now that Yamada had gone and admitted to wanting to date him? How was Yuuki supposed to begin dealing with that?

They sat, the silence growing heavier with each passing second. Yamada scraped up the last few bites of his curry; Segawa sipped at her drink. The awkwardness of it all was almost palpable, like a bad stench in the air.

“Okay,” Yamada said, at last. “I, uh, should also say that I only thought that way for a couple of hours. If you didn’t have a boyfriend that’d be different, but you do, and you—you love him, don’t you, Mishima?”

“Yeah, I do,” Yuuki said. He bit his lip, then blurted out: “But if I didn’t, maybe I would. Date you. But I do.”

“You would, huh,” Yamada said. He turned to Segawa. “If I learn to cook, do you think—”

“Maybe,” Segawa said, capping her bottle.

He turned back to Yuuki. “‘Maybe,’ she says.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to feel like a consolation prize,” Yuuki said.

“Maybe I’d like a boyfriend that can already cook, like Mishima,” Segawa added, “so you’d have to learn before I find one. Unless what you’re trying to ask for is a kiss so you know you can like girls too, Yamada.”

“I—no, I wasn’t,” Yamada said. “Sorry, I—I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I think you were thinking that it’d be nice if Segawa said she’d date you, too,” Yuuki said. “Like she did for me. It’s—it’s nice, knowing you’re wanted like that.”

“I think we’re using a very loose definition of the word ‘date’ here.”

“But I would date him,” Segawa said. “He can cook; he’s a tutor, so he’s probably good at explaining things; he’s devoted. I’m sure there are other reasons.”

Yuuki was pretty sure being brave wasn’t one of those reasons.

Yamada sighed. “Look, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Yamamoto always said I couldn’t read a room; guess she was right. I’ll just… go.”

“Are you sure?” Segawa asked.

“Yeah,” he said, grabbing his plate and the drink he’d barely touched. “Thanks for this, Segawa. And… thanks for hearing me out. Both of you.”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said. The stairs creaked and groaned as he left.

Segawa turned back to her own plate and lay the bottle on top. “I don’t really know what to say, Mishima.”

“We’re just three awkward college students trying to make each other feel better,” Yuuki said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Not about that. About—about the game that isn’t a game, and how you’re the person Yamamoto is looking for. That really does seem like a strange twist of fate, doesn’t it?”

“Not really.” Although it did seem right to think that way. “If it wasn’t her, it would’ve been someone else—and if it wasn’t me, then it would’ve been someone else. This could have happened to anybody.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s true. It’s hard to explain, and this is presumptuous of me, but… Maybe you were meant to be the—the axis upon which all of this turns. You and your boyfriend.”

“I don’t really like the sound of that,” he admitted.

“And I don’t know how else to say it,” she said, with a shy smile. “That’s what feels right: that you’re meant to be at the center of it all. I won’t say you put yourself there, but that’s where you are.”

Him, at the center of it all. Boring old crybaby Yuuki Mishima, one of Kamoshida’s favorite punching bags and his preferred messenger boy; walking gay disaster Yuuki Mishima, who loved a boy trapped in another dimension, who’d been the only one willing to stay and help him because they were all the other had.

Him.

“No, you’re right,” he said. He had put himself there. His stupid, lonely heart had ached and wanted and there was someone who was always there for him when he needed it. Naturally he’d gotten attached, and naturally Yuuki wanted that boy back home, where they could be together in the flesh, so naturally he put a target on his back in the form of a website that just made the world at large curious.

But it was helping Akira. There were people who’d gotten so far—one was going to be fighting the final boss this weekend, and Yuuki planned on visiting a shrine tonight to pray for success, since gym time with Ryuji had been canceled due to his leg acting up—because of his website. They shared tips and tricks and details that otherwise would have been lost in their individual failures but became the stepping stones for others to succeed.

Yuuki did that. Him. Not Futaba or Yusuke or Ryuji or any of the other billion people on the planet but _him_.

“Careful, though,” he said, as she picked up her plate and purse and rounded the bench. “I might get used to it.”

Segawa stared at him for a while, and he wondered if he got the teasing tone down right. It couldn’t be any different than with Ryuji or Futaba—Yusuke never seemed to pick up on it, so he didn’t count—but maybe it was, maybe she didn’t get it—

Her face broke out into a smile. “I think I’d like that. But, your friend—will she be able to handle Yamamoto on her own?”

“If she can’t, she’ll let you know.”

Segawa didn’t question that. Yuuki wasn’t sure how he would have explained knowing an infamous hacker and was glad he didn’t have to.

… And, once she was gone, allowed himself the brief but evil thought of Yamamoto going back to college as an isekai otaku, ostracized and discredited because her delusions made her undesirable to know or talk to. It was the same thing he’d wished on his middle school bullies and Kamoshida: for them to get their just desserts; for karmic retribution to come sweeping in and make them feel what he had.

And then he hated himself for it. It was no better than trying to control every action Akira made in that dream world he’d been held captive in; Yuuki would be no better than his bullies if he sat back and enjoyed what happened to them, whether he felt they deserved it or not. All he could do was hope that they would learn from it all and change for the better.

All he could do was believe.

* * *

Ryuji wasn’t sure what to make of Ann sitting on his couch, curled into the pillows with her feet up beside her. On the one hand, Ann was in his house, sitting on his couch, and his ma wasn’t home; on the other, his ma was due back tonight and the fancy western-style pot roast he’d shoved in the oven was beginning to make him drool and he couldn’t focus on Ann, at all.

He kept thinking of Niijima and that Haru woman. They were leaving. They were fleeing Japan like refugees from a war zone, and all because of the sleazebag Haru had been forced to marry. He’d found the articles online. They made him sick.

He rubbed at Ann’s feet, thumbs pressing into the sore spots. She was like a puddle of goo at the other end of the couch, worn out from a morning spent at a long gig in heels.

“You’re the best,” she mumbled, eyes half-closed and clearly not focusing on the rerun of the drama she’d wanted to watch. She was so far behind on everything she’d said there was almost no point in trying to catch up until he said he’d watch with her. She’d brightened like the sun, then, and smiled and kissed him.

His bad leg was stretched out in front of him, aching because of the rain. Sometimes he could ignore it; sometimes it was so bad nothing he did helped. Today was one of those days where he could barely move around the apartment without gritting his teeth at the agony it screamed at him, and the icebag wasn’t doing jack shit.

“Nah, you are,” he said. Ann whined as his thumb dug into a particularly bad spot and hid her face in the pillow, and he thought it was a good thing she’d taken all her makeup off as soon as she got here. “Ya didn’t have to come over or go grocery shopping for me, but you did. Thanks, babe.”

“It’s not a big deal,” she said, muffled into her pillow. “What were you going to eat if I didn’t, anyway? Instant ramen?”

“Well, yeah.” It was cheap and they had tons of it in one of the cupboards since it didn’t go bad. Substituting a meal or two with it every so often wouldn’t hurt, right?

“Ugh, it’s not really food, you know,” Ann groaned. “How can you eat it all the time?”

“I dunno. It tastes pretty good to me.”

“That’s because you have no taste buds.”

“Just cause I don’t got a sweet tooth like yours doesn’t mean I can’t taste nothing.”

She laughed. “Good thing, too, or I’d have trouble controlling myself.”

They watched TV for a while. So-and-so the character was in the middle of a long monologue that bordered on crazy rant on his love for three different girls in the show when Ann said, “But that’s not what I meant. We’ve been dating for a week but you haven’t pushed to do anything. That’s why you’re the best.”

“It’s only been a week; why would I do that?”

She shrugged. “It’s long enough for some people.”

“Like who?”

But, did he even have to ask? People like Kamoshida, who thought they owned their partners, who thought others were nothing more than tools to make themselves look better. Kamoshida had broken Ryuji’s leg just because he didn’t want the track team to outshine his volleyball teams; Kamoshida had never seen the people behind those teams, just like he couldn’t see Ann behind her looks.

“Who do you think?” she asked, quietly enough that a scream from So-and-so onscreen nearly drowned her out.

Ryuji sighed. He stopped massaging and let his hand rest on her foot; she flexed her toes, nails painted a sky-blue like her eyes. “I told you before I don’t want to push you,” he reminded her.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s why you’re the best. I’m kind of nervous about meeting your mom, though. Do you—do you think she’ll like me?”

 _Do you think she won’t mind that I’m a quarter-American but look like a European native_ , was what she meant. Blonde hair, blue eyes, not a trace of Japanese on her; the gene pool had been cruel in that regard, but she’d said she was also only a quarter-Japanese, too.

It was all just a bunch of stupid fucking numbers in the end. What did it matter what she looked like?

“Course I do,” he said. If his ma’s intense questioning had been anything to go by, she already loved Ann. All she needed to do was meet her. “She’ll love ya, I swear. Ma ain’t the type to judge.”

Ann’s parents, though—they would judge. He looked like a hoodlum and talked like a delinquent half the time, and her folks were fancy fashion designers rubbing elbows with the elite. They’d look down their noses at him just like Kamoshida and everybody else at Shujin had, and it would only be a matter of time before he blew up at them and ruined everything.

“I hope so,” Ann said.

They went quiet again. Ryuji was tempted to dig through the pantry for crackers or chips—anything to keep his stomach from complaining at the smell of food he couldn’t eat yet—but Ann was stretched out comfortably with her feet on his lap and he didn’t want to ruin this, whatever it was.

“Hey, Ann,” he said during a commercial break.

“Yeah?”

“You—uh, you remember Niijima, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You said she was rooming with a friend who had a kid. I thought it was weird. Shiho made it sound completely normal, though; maybe they’ve been in touch and she never told me.”

She frowned at the thought of her best friend keeping a secret from her. It wasn’t as bad as wanting to die, Ryuji thought, and judging from the way Ann had acted before she didn’t like the mere mention of Niijima’s name. If they exchanged letters or whatever in secret, it was probably just because Shiho didn’t want to upset her further.

She was a good friend. Better than Yusuke.

“Maybe,” he said. Was this really a good idea? Did Ann care what would happen to Niijima? Would she just say good riddance and wash her hands of it all?

But—it didn’t sit right with him, Niijima leaving like this, throwing away all of her connections here to make it somewhere else. She was disowned and had a record—would she be able to find work somewhere else? What if she couldn’t? What would she do then?

“I, uh,” he said, “I found out she’s leaving. Her and her friend and the kid, too. They’re all leaving.”

“Okay,” Ann said. “And?”

“And I’m worried, dammit.” Ann rolled over at his tone, sitting up, taking her feet away but moving in close to hug him with an arm wrapped around his waist. She rested her head on his shoulder. “She made this big goddamn deal about being so much smarter than everyone else back at Shujin, she was on my ass all the time for not following the dress code—now she decides that rules are for chumps and she’s gonna sneak outta the country when her friend’s husband is a piece of shit with enough pull to have ‘em both locked up someplace where nobody could ever find ‘em. And the kid, too—she’s so fucking small, Ann. If she got threatened they’d do whatever the bastard wanted ‘em to to keep her safe.”

“You’re worried because it’s dangerous for them.”

“Yeah,” he said, knowing he was glowering—the TV screen went dark as the end credits rolled, and his face was right there, glaring away—and his lips was curled with pain and disgust. “It’s—it’s a different _country_ , Ann. But they don’t know where they’re going or what they’re going to do when they get there and for all I know they’re gonna get taken advantage of and I hate that kinda shit. I hate it.”

Because for all that she was annoying, Niijima had just been trying to help everybody, in the end. She was still trying to—but what if that kid got hurt because of her? What if what she was doing was just going to hurt them all? Would it have been worth it, then?

God, she was so stupid. Booksmart but without a shred of common sense in her. Assholes on the street would eat her alive.

“You really are the best,” Ann said. “You might not like her, but you don’t want her to get hurt, and that’s—that’s better than me. Better than I would have thought before you told me she’s just like us: powerless in the face of jerks who abuse their positions. Just because she was the Student Council President doesn’t mean she could have done anything, and now…”

“Feels like she’s chomping at the bit to make it up to everybody.”

“Yeah, exactly.” She hummed in thought, fingers tracing his ribs. His skin burned through his clothes where she touched him, their shared body heat mixing with the stifling heat of the apartment; the balcony door, swung wide open to let every single breeze in, did nothing to stifle it.

Then she nodded. “Alright, I’ve decided! I gotta go make a phone call. Do you want some more ice before I do?”

Most of it was melted by now and growing gradually warmer, but, “Nah, I’m good. It’s still kinda cold. But, uh—what did you decide?”

“The studio my parents work at is always looking for help,” she said, digging around in her purse before pulling out her phone. The lockscreen was a selfie of him and Ann and Shiho at the beach, the others barely visible in the background: Yuuki with a towel over his head, fresh from the sea; Yusuke drinking from a water bottle; Futaba and her mom arguing over a book. “I’m sure if I ask, they’ll take on Niijima. Maybe her friend, too. It’s not the best city to live in since the rent is so high, but it’ll help them out, won’t it?”

“I—yeah, I guess so,” he said, at a loss. “But, are you sure you wanna help them? You didn’t even like her before last week.”

“If I don’t it’ll weigh on me now that you’ve told me,” she explained, “and besides, if they’re working for my parents I can ask how they’re doing. We won’t have to sit here in the dark about it, wondering if they’re okay or if they’ve been, I don’t know, rounded up by those creeps on the news. We’ll _know_ , Ryuji.”

That was true. They could at least be in the loop instead of wondering about Miss Prez Niijima and her goddamn unfortunate friend and the kid that didn’t deserve any of this.

It was the kid, Ryuji thought. If it wasn’t for the damn kid, he wouldn’t care; if it wasn’t for the damn kid Niijima and her friend would have left by now, and none of them would have ever known what had happened to them.

Ryuji wasn’t sure whether to be glad or upset about that.

As Ann navigated her—actually pretty extensive—contacts list, searching for one of her parents or maybe an agent from the studio or whatever, Ryuji said, “Guess Niijima just got more friends then, huh?”

“Imagine that,” Ann said, patting his good leg. “Ryuji Sakamoto, Shujin Academy’s resident delinquent, becoming friends with his worst enemy, Miss Student Council President Makoto Niijima.”

“Imagine her having friends with anybody,” he said, digging his own phone out of his pocket. Even if Ann did get in contact with this studio and they did say they wanted Niijima to work there, it wouldn’t mean much if they couldn’t tell her, and Futaba was the only one he knew of with enough smarts to find out what her number or email was.

… If she’d even accept a call from an unknown number or read an email from an address she didn’t know, and there was no way that starting either with _Hey, this is Sakamoto, the guy that hated your guts_ , was going to go over well.

One thing at a time, he thought. This was all supposing Ann’s call went well and they wanted Niijima and Futaba could get her contact info. Ryuji could figure out what he’d say from there, if he wanted to contact Niijima at all. Futaba might decide she wanted to do it.

(He didn’t see that going over very well, but, whatever.)

He let Ann talk her way through a long conversation that sounded like it was mostly about her and not about Niijima, his brain sliding over the words that went by too fast for him to understand. He knew _Ann_ and _Hi, how are you_ and a bunch of little shit like how to ask for a burger or where the bathroom was, but Ann’s rapid-fire English sounded… foreign. So completely different from the careful pronunciation of his teachers and Haru in the cafe that he realized all over again that yeah, Ann wasn’t completely Japanese. Ann didn’t belong just _here_ , wasting away her life being eye candy for a bunch of creeps who would never see how great she was.

When it was done he leaned into her as she put her phone away. “You’re the best,” he said, through a mouthful of her hair.

“That sounds familiar,” she said, and laughed. Ryuji found he wasn’t worried how the call ended—turned out her mom would call the studio and ask for her, then get back to Ann—but in the way Ann hugged him tight and ran her nails down his back.

That shit felt good. He shuddered, leg forgotten for once in his damn life, the ice bag fallen to the floor.

“Even if it doesn’t work out,” Ann said, “I think I’ll still be Niijima’s friend. She can’t escape us that easily.”

He tried to imagine Niijima and Ann, friends, chatting over too-sweet crepes or fashion. He couldn’t, if only because straight-laced Miss Prez looked as if she’d never had a triple-chocolate crepe in her life, much less worn the expensive designer brands Ann regularly modeled.

“You really think she’d want us as friends?” he asked.

“I think we won’t know until we try,” Ann said.

“You think?”

It wouldn’t exactly be the most he’d ever tried, but… It was Niijima, who acted like she was just as worthless now as she was when she was Miss Prez, so desperate for a good future and too much of a stickler for the rules that she hadn’t been willing to rock the boat until it was too late. She’d depended too much on the adults around her to do the right thing and it had gotten her nowhere except a juvie cell once she was tired of watching her students be pushed down over and over again.

It was exactly the kind of thing Ryuji should have done with Kamoshida but had been too chickenshit to do it, too afraid of how it would affect his ma—and too upset over his broken leg to think of anything, anyway, and in too much pain to think of anything but his leg and how much it ached and how much it sucked that no one, not even the other track team members, tried to help him. He’d been alone and he’d known it—and Niijima had been alone, too. She was still alone, with no damn support other than a weird back-alley doctor and a young mother.

That was no way to live.

“Yeah, I _do_ think,” Ann said. “I’ll bombard her with texts until she realizes we’re friends whether she wants to be or not. I’ll even be friends with her friend, too. The more the merrier!”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that. Ann smacked him for it, but wound up following along after a while, TV forgotten, the smell of pot roast heavy in the air.

“Hey, Ann,” he said, when they both calmed down. “I love you, you know?”

“Yeah,” she said, and he blamed the waver in her voice on the laughter and how it still shook her. He could feel the giggles as tremors under her skin. “I _do_ know.”

They held each other until the rain came back, splashing through the open balcony door and sending Ann into a frenzy to shut it, broken AC or no. He didn’t mind that she didn’t say she loved him—though he hoped eventually she would, when she was ready, when she wasn’t so damn haunted by all the assholes from before—because it wasn’t just words, he was realizing. It wasn’t just _words_ , it was actions and deeds; it was braving the Tokyo subway on a hot summer afternoon with bags full of groceries in the rain just so he wouldn’t be alone with his stupid fucking leg. It was wrestling with the finicky balcony door as the rain hit her in the face. It was being present even without chatter to fill the silence.

He hobbled up behind her and jerked the balcony door shut, hands lingering at her sides just long enough to feel the ghost of her warmth until he saw her face in the glass and the fear in her eyes.

Ryuji snatched his hands back. “I’ll—I’ll go get the fan. We’re gonna need it.”

“Yeah,” she said, softer than usual. That was okay, he thought. It was okay for her to be scared, and if she wanted to leave she could always do so while he dragged the damn fan out of his room.

She didn’t. Relief relaxed the tension he didn’t know had built up in his shoulders; the icebag, filled with more ice, was a blessing he hadn’t realized he needed until it was back on his damn leg and he was sighing as the pain numbed.

And if he felt a little more relief as she took his hand as they watched more mindless TV, well. He wasn’t complaining.


	21. Summer Vacation, The Second Friday, Evening

Yusuke arrived back at his apartment just as the rain picked up again, the cries of passerby caught unaware in the sudden downpour muffled as the door closed behind him. He opted for the stairs, mind whirling at the decision he still had to make and making him too restless to stand quietly in the elevator.

Although it wasn’t much of a decision. Akira wanted him to Dive again— _needed_ him to Dive again—so he had to.

Yusuke just didn’t _want_ to. He didn’t want to know what kind of secrets were hidden within the deepest reaches of Akira’s heart—and in case it went both ways, he didn’t want Akira to know his own, either—but something had to be done, and it had to be done soon, and—

And it wasn’t as if Yusuke had anyone else to turn to. Futaba had sent him a single questioning text about the mixer that Yusuke had been too afraid to answer; an hour later, after she was done waiting patiently, she began bombarding him with more texts, more messages, more questions.

He’d turned his phone off, then, and paid his train fare in cash to avoid her. Thinking about the mixer made him think of Yuuki, and Ryuji, and how Yusuke had let them both down, and how unfit he was to be acquainted with either of them.

He could no longer tell if it was Madarame’s influence or genuine concern or a fundamental lack of his own character; all he knew was that he was disgusting, and no one deserved to come into contact with him. Interactions with Akira were at least kept to a minimum, as the prompts never popped up unless it was necessary.

If only life were the same way. If only Yusuke could escape behind a screen—behind a painting—behind his Sensei’s back—and live ignorant of how awful he truly was.

If only life were the same way—but it wasn’t. Yusuke had to face the world himself, without any barrier, and that meant subjecting it to his… everything. Everything about him that wasn’t desirable, that drove wedges in between him and the only people who cared, that forced him to say one thing or another that wasn’t right or fair or true.

He took a bath when he arrived home, a long soak meant more to delay the inevitable than to warm him up from the chill of the rain, and ate dinner with Nakanohara when he returned from work. He said nothing of Kayo; Yusuke supposed this was a good thing, but didn’t have enough gall to state it.

He was so—so tired. So tired, tired enough that when Nakanohara said nothing when they were done with the dishes, he was glad for it.

Perhaps—perhaps if he distanced himself, he could make his way through the Dive.

(And, perhaps if he could become a time-traveler, he could avoid having to see Yuuki and Yamada in that alley—but what was done was done, and there was nothing Yusuke could do to change that.)

He sighed and set up his charger next to the bed, and curled up as his phone booted up—a dozen new messages from Futaba since he’d turned his phone off, mostly about how he couldn’t be so rude as to ignore her like this and if he was then she would just have to ask Yuuki what happened, which made him wonder if Yuuki would tell the truth or lie to save face, and a handful of messages from Togo, asking if he was free to play shogi with her sometime soon.

She was worried, though she didn’t come out and say it. She had every right to be, after the mixer and how they parted for the night. Yusuke could, at the very least, explain it—perhaps she would be just as scandalized as he was, but perhaps she would push him to find out the truth of the matter, and he—he wouldn’t be able to. Not yet. She would accept that, he thought. She wasn’t entirely cruel.

Not like himself.

So he agreed, against his better judgment. Tomorrow night, so he could work a shift at Miss Hanasaki’s in the morning; perhaps working with flowers and seeing the joy on some of the customer’s faces at his bouquets would help ease all of… this, so he could face Togo, and if she judged him she would do it quietly, with the faintest of frowns of disapproval to show it.

(And if she judged Yuuki—would Yusuke be angry? Would he feel relief? What would it feel like, knowing others thought the same way he did?)

Then he braced himself and opened the app, prepared for the sight of Akira laid up in bed with his fever, the bowl of porridge half-eaten.

It was empty.

Kanon came out of her meditative state at Akira’s bedside as the robot whirred to life. _“Good evening,”_ she said, and perhaps noticed how fixated he was on the bowl, as she added, _“As you asked, he ate every bite. Renaflask was even cruel at the end, adding what was left from the pot when it got too cold to finish.”_

Yusuke should have anticipated this, but—damn it all. The sliver of hope he had entertained since stepping out of the apartment that morning withered and died; of course Akira would meet his challenge head-on _and_ go further than Yusuke expected him to. It was a testament to how badly he needed this.

**Where are the others?**

_“_ _Out,”_ Kanon stated. _“They went to a restaurant down the street. Renaflask felt it wouldn’t be fair to his customers to stay open while we nursed a sick man in the back, then said he was tired of cooking for the day. They’re getting dinner.”_

Her stomach rumbled, audible in the quiet room and through his phone’s speakers. **You should join them.**

She looked ready to argue, but then said, _“Are you sure? Ionasal might wake up and need assistance you can’t provide…”_

 **I’m sure** , he picked. Taking Akira to the Dive Shop in his state would be much easier if no one noticed them leaving and protested, although that would depend on whether he woke up or not.

 _“_ _I—I see,”_ Kanon said. How many hours had she been here, waiting for his return and forgoing meals to keep watch over Akira? When had the others left? _“Then—then I will leave it to you.”_

She gave him a bow he wanted to laugh at—not because it was sloppy, since everything Kanon did was with the utmost sincerity, but because he didn’t deserve her trust. Not now.

It was only when the outer door to the restaurant closed that Akira stirred, asking in a voice that did not sound as if he had just woken up, _“So we can go, then?”_

**If you can walk to the door.**

_“_ _More orders?”_ he said, wheezing out a laugh. He got out of bed slowly, changed just as carefully, and hobbled over to the door. He rubbed at his arms for warmth, and as he stood there shivering slightly, Yusuke contemplated reconsidering. It would be easy to, and Akira wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight—but breaking his trust now, when they were so close to the end, was a surefire way to lose the app and any hope Yuuki and Akira had of ever meeting.

(And—Yusuke had gone to school for weeks on next to no sleep and with barely any food to sustain him. Did he really, truly, have the right to tell this boy what he could and couldn’t do?)

 _“_ _You promised,”_ Akira reminded him.

Yusuke sighed. At least he knew from experience that if they walked slowly enough it wouldn’t wear Akira out faster, and the Dive Shop wasn’t so far that it was impossible to get to.

 _“_ _I can make it,”_ Akira insisted.

 **Alright** , he picked.

And Akira did make it, shuffling down the street at a near-crawl that picked up as his muscles worked and stretched after the day spent in bed. He wasn’t out of breath by the time they reached the shop, either, though that was likely due to the deep breaths he was taking.

 _“_ _Evening,”_ said the technician on duty. _“Looking to Dive? Awfully late for that, don’t you think?”_

Akira laughed, short and breathy, and said, _“Some things can’t wait.”_

The technician eyed him then, the slight pallor of his face making the faint color high on his cheeks stand out. His hair was a riot of tangles that he hadn’t bothered to brush out, and Yusuke would bet that he stank of fever-sweat.

 _“_ _Are you sure?”_ the technician asked at length, as if he wanted to turn them away but couldn’t find a reason to.

 _“_ _Yes,”_ Akira said. _“So, please.”_

Perhaps the conviction in his eyes was what made the technician relent; he sighed and, reciting the usual warnings, thumbed the pages of one of the books on his desk. Yusuke paid the fee and watched as Akira climbed into one of the Diving tubes, which slid shut and sealed itself, then began filling with liquid.

(Yusuke still did not understand the properties of it; Akira never came out wet and he didn’t seem to need to breathe while in there, so it wasn’t water. Some sort of thought-provoking fluid was the best he could come up with.)

 _“_ _Now, are_ you _sure?”_ the technician said. _“This isn’t exactly safe when your partner’s healthy, you know. You’re going to have to be extra careful, and there’s no telling what effect an illness might have on his subconscious.”_

 **The illness** _ **is**_ **subconscious** , Yusuke picked.

 _“_ _Is it?”_ the technician asked, then shook his head. _“No, it—it doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t be letting you do this, it’s way too dangerous—”_

**It would be dangerous regardless.**

_“_ _Don’t,”_ the technician snapped. _“I know how dangerous it is. Just—_ _”_ he sighed, _“_ _just be careful.”_

He hooked up the machines with shaking hands. He was going to be angry later, when the Dive was done and the issue mostly resolved, but had to know that there were some secrets that could never be said aloud until they were first discovered. With all of the cheap romance novels he’d read scattered around the shop, he had to realize that.

The technician hesitated for only a second before pressing the final button. Yusuke’s screen went dark, and he navigated the following menu with only the slightest bit of trepidation; if he failed here, then surely it would mean that he wasn’t worthy of being Akira’s savior after all, and that would mean that he was meant to watch Yuuki wallow in lost love for the rest of eternity.

But even if he was destined to fail… this was Akira. Yusuke knew so little about him and the boy he used to be that it was hard to believe he was real, at times, and if they were going to succeed in helping the people of Ra Ciela and bring Akira home, that had to change.

Akira was real. He was just as real as Yusuke was, and he was just as unknowable as Yuuki or Ryuji were. That was all.

He shut his eyes against the glare of the loading screen. This had to be done, and that was all there was to it.

**Earthes & Akira Diving => Akira**

**Starry Sky Vacuum Tube**

**Now Loading…**

And opened them to darkness.

Yusuke should have been prepared for something like this. As Morgana, unseen but heard in the sea of darkness, went on about the deepest levels of the heart and Akira, Yusuke could only think of _Desire_ still propped against his wall. Darkness deep enough to swallow a man whole—a darkness deep enough to pervade even the subconscious mind—and fit to drown in.

 _“There’s no telling what you’ll find, you know,”_ Morgana said. _“All the things he can’t say—all the things he’ll never be able to say, not to you or anyone else—they’ll be down here._ _If you really think you’re prepared, you’re more than welcome to try.”_

It wasn’t what he wanted to do. He’d intended to abide by Akira’s wishes, subconscious or not, and refuse to go any deeper into his mind; then the issue with the former Prime Minister came up, and Akira had been concerned for her. She had lost her mind to Goro, too, and the things Yusuke had seen locked away in her head weren’t pleasant. The tremendous guilt she’d felt had been like the blade of a guillotine hanging above her head, ready and willing to cut her down where she stood.

(The root of it was Akira, like a rotting wound left to fester and eat her alive. Yusuke had not said this. Yusuke wasn’t sure Akira could handle it, concerned as he was with everything else going on around him.)

It wasn’t what he wanted to do, but if Akira asked, then Yusuke had to. In order to succeed where men like Sakaki had failed, they had to, together.

That did not make this darkness any less suffocating.

 _“_ _There you are,”_ said the mental-Akira, after Yusuke set the robot off in a random direction. It was hard to tell where he was going or if he was making progress. It was hard to tell whether Morgana was still around or if he’d left; all he knew was that the mental-Akira was here, now, glowing faintly. It had to be a trick of the app. It didn’t make sense otherwise.

**It’s so dark.**

_“_ _Yeah,”_ the mental-Akira sighed. _“That’s kinda what happens when you try to hide every single thing that’s bad about yourself. You want to push it down into a dark pit, and it winds up here.”_

He shrugged, seemingly nonplussed even as his face twitched into and out of worry.

**Can we make it bright again?**

_“_ _I don’t know,”_ he said. _“Maybe? If we can change how the real me thinks about the things he wants to hide, it might be possible.”_

 _“_ _That’s because it_ is _possible,”_ Morgana hissed, before hopping—Yusuke assumed—off the robot’s lanky frame. He, too, was glowing faintly, but it was disconcerting when Yusuke’s eyes insisted he should be seeing nothing. _“This darkness—it’s usually only seen in people who hate each other. You don’t want to see, you don’t want to learn or understand them, and you blot it out unconsciously. You couldn’t stand the parts of you you thought were bad, so you blotted them out all on your own—although it’s definitely possible a few of your friends are here, too. You’ve worried them, Keeper.”_

 _“_ _I have, huh,”_ the mental-Akira muttered quietly, and Morgana’s stance softened. His tail twitched.

Then he grinned. _“But, since you’re going to be trying to fix all that bad stuff—the least I can do is support you with a present. A gift from me to you for trying your hardest!”_

 _“_ _Morgana,”_ the mental-Akira breathed as Morgana snapped his fingers to reveal the familiar grassy hillside of the Hymmnofort, though it was dulled by a persistent gloom.

But Yusuke could see, at least a little, now. **Thank you** , he picked.

_“_ _Yes, thank you, Morgana.”_

The cat-boy scratched at an ear, turning to look at a rock jutting out of the ground. _“I’m here to support you, remember? The rest will be up to you. No more handouts!”_

 _“_ _I wouldn’t expect any,”_ the mental-Akira said, squinting off into the distance where the hillside succumbed to darkness once more, before taking hold of the robot’s arm and setting out. Morgana settled on a stretch of rock as if to sun himself, tail wagging a goodbye as he watched them go, blue eyes brighter than Yusuke recalled them being.

 _“_ _I wish he’d be more honest with himself,”_ the mental-Akira chuckled, once they were out of sight of the hillside. Darkness pressed in again, and Akira’s steps slowed down until they sputtered to a stop. _“Ah, but this is worse, isn’t it? It almost feels alive, here, worse than it did before, doesn’t it?”_

He looked back over his shoulder, to the pinprick of light that was Morgana’s hillside. Yusuke looked and thought he could still see Morgana’s tail waving; it hadn’t seemed to be such a long walk, but that was the trick of mental spaces: like dreams, they defied reality. A few steps could be ten leagues could be only a few feet.

The mental-Akira shivered as he watched the light. _“This is what it felt like,”_ he said. _“I was always… outside of everyone else. The kids at school didn’t want to talk to me; they called me a troublemaker even when all I wanted to do was help people. Even on my gymnastics team there were a dozen kids who were better than I was; I got used to shutting up and pretended it didn’t bother me that no one seemed to notice what I was doing when it wasn’t ‘bad.’”_

 _“_ _Don’t be ridiculous,”_ a mental-Kanon said, materializing out of the gloom. Akira’s former rival in the Imperial Candidate Trials, now nothing more than a shopkeeper supplying the Sharl with everyday items they didn’t quite need, never shedding that imperial air or that stern stare, as if she took offense with the world at large for existing. _“It was because you were ‘outside’ of them that you could help them. Wasn’t that how you helped me?”_

_“_ _I don’t think meddling the way I have can be considered ‘helping.’”_

_“_ _It can,”_ the mental-Kanon insisted. _“Unless you think I could have changed and grown on my own, when I was ready to die to atone for our past mistakes? You said it yourself: who would that have helped, if I were to die and leave you all to your fates?”_

The mental-Akira shook his head. _“That was just me being selfish. How do you know I wasn’t saying that so you had to suffer with me?”_

_“_ _Even if it was selfish of you, it meant a great deal to me. I’m sure some of the others you’ve helped can say the same, can’t they? You were the one who taught me that we shouldn’t let the wishes of the masses sway our decisions; that’s what it means to be a good leader, but that’s also what it means to be a good friend.”_

The mental-Akira kept staring at the spot of light in the distance. Slowly, he said, _“There was a girl on my gymnastics team—she was good, she was really, really good, good enough to take home the gold at nearly every competition she entered. I asked her what it was like, once, and she told me that if I stopped fooling around I could find out for myself, but—I never wanted to win. Winning meant I’d be seen, when I’d gotten so used to hiding, and it meant being scrutinized the way she was. Everything I did was already being picked apart by the town gossips; I didn’t want victory to be spoiled by that, too.”_

 _“_ _But?”_ the mental-Kanon pressed. The mental-Akira sighed.

 _“_ _But I shouldn’t have,”_ he said. _“I should have tried harder—to win, to make friends, to find the few people I could trust when it felt like everyone else was against me. What I was doing was no better than this, just watching from afar and wishing I could be there, that I could have it for my own.”_

 _“_ _And us,”_ the mental-Kanon said, as he trailed off, hands pressed to his heart. To Yuuki, Yusuke knew now. To the reminder of him. _“Do you think you should have done the same with us?”_

 _“_ _No, of course not,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“We’ve—we’ve fought, and we haven’t always been on the same side or seen eye-to-eye, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be friends now. There’s no way I could have managed to get this far without all of your help. Even if we’re separated, what you all mean to me won’t change.”_

_“_ _Then it’s safe to say that you’re no longer ‘outside,’_ _isn’t it_ _? You belong somewhere now, don’t you?”_

_“_ _I—”_ he broke off, gazing not at the light any longer, but at the mental-Kanon, her fierce stare promising pain if she had to keep trying to convince him. He laughed, one hand going up to tug at a curl. _“I do, don’t I,”_ he finished. _“You won’t take no for an answer.”_

 _“_ _I won’t,”_ she said, and smiled. It was blinding; or perhaps that was the scenery lighting up, Morgana’s hillside giving way to rolling plains studded with the ruins of ancient brickwork buildings.

 _“_ _Trust is hard, Ionasal,”_ she said, as the mental-Akira squinted against the sudden light. _“But it is worth it, in the end. Whatever it is you have to say and whenever you would like to say it, we will be there for you. We will listen.”_

 _“_ _I know,”_ the mental-Akira said, and turned and ran from her. She didn’t give chase or shout after them, just watched on as Morgana had, until she was swallowed up by distance and shadows, and like the last time, it was only when the light in the distance was no bigger than a speck that the mental-Akira stopped again.

 _“_ _She says that,”_ he said with a dry chuckle that fell short as he clutched at his side, _“but she has to know that this—all of this—it’s my fault. Destroying the planet, creating those Sharl that were attacking those people—that was_ me _. I did that. How can I be trusted after ruining so many lives?”_

Yusuke felt he was ready this time; the mental-Ren’s appearance only made him sigh and burrow deeper under his covers.

 _“_ _I think you mean how can you not be trusted after saving so many lives,”_ the mental-Ren corrected, wagging a finger. _“And don’t you dare start up with that took-your-body stuff again. We’ve been over this how many times now?”_

The mental-Akira only stared, wincing at the pain in his side. A stitch, Yusuke guessed, or the weight of his guilt like a knife to his gut.

 _“_ _You didn’t ruin anyone’s lives,”_ the mental-Ren went on, eyeing the way the mental-Akira’s fingers dug into his ribs. _“You did what you had to. You did what was planned, right down to the letter. Anyone else in your position would have had to do the same, myself included, if I hadn’t been shoved aside—and that’s not your fault,”_ he added, as the mental-Akira moved to protest. _“We needed the power of another dimension and it was just my own rotten luck that I was the only one fit enough to be replaced. It wasn’t—wasn’t me, exactly, but my position. As the Emperor’s son I was guaranteed to take part the Candidate Trials, and so was anyone who happened to, say, take over my body.”_

He grinned, though it was shaky at the edges. The mental-Akira took a breath that shuddered his whole body, and straightened a bit.

The mental-Ren continued: _“And it’s not like my life got any worse afterward. It was the same old, same old, just with different guys trying to kill me. I, uh, actually had way more fun being a dancer than I did being a prince, okay?”_

_“_ _I know, but—”_

_“_ _But nothing,”_ the mental-Ren cut him off. _“But_ nothing _. We have not hashed this out a dozen times over so you can still feel guilty about it. I know you want to go back home, and I know that you’re forcing yourself to rush through this, but the world won’t fall down around our ears just yet. You’ve got capable people surrounding you, too. Trust us a little more.”_

 _“_ _Because friends help each other out,”_ the mental-Akira guessed.

_“_ _Ha, see, you do get it. And before you start up on Delta; he chose it this time. Turns out Earthes here is actually a pretty nice guy.”_

_“_ _He is, isn’t he,”_ the mental-Akira said, finally standing tall once again. He kept his hand at his side, rubbing away any lingering pain.

The mental-Ren stretched his arms over his head; the darkness around them lightened so gradually that Yusuke expected to see the sun rising in the distance. The rolling sea of hills and ruins had given way to a mountaintop Yusuke didn’t recall climbing, its peak scudded with low-hanging clouds and a pearlescent staircase stretching off into the sky.

 _“_ _You know, I think after all this I might get myself a girlfriend.”_ The mental-Ren stared off into the clouds as he said it, fiddling with the gloves on his hands. _“I mean, I’m pretty handsome. Shirotaka even thinks so; that’s got to count for something, right? But a prettier girl on my arm—that’d be the life, and it’d be a perfect way to remind myself we’re finally at peace.”_

 _“_ _Shirotaka thought you were a girl for a while,”_ the mental-Akira reminded him, and Yusuke supposed the gentle waves of hair that escaped Ren’s low ponytail did frame his face in such a way that one could mistake it to be feminine, but the bone structure was all wrong. It was strong where a woman’s would be gentler, more sloping—but that was the thing with Sharl. They could be whatever they pleased.

The mental-Ren sighed at whatever image the words dragged up. _“And he didn’t even care when he found out I was a boy, he just started yelling something about traps and moe. I understood two words in ten, maybe, and then he ran off to do… whatever it is he does. But you, though,”_ he exclaimed, changing the subject, _“you’ve got Earthes here! Strong, dependable, sleek… uh…”_

 _“_ _I’m not going to date a robot,”_ the mental-Akira said.

_“_ _Hey, I wasn’t judging! Just, you know, there’s a guy on the other side. He’s deep in your Soulscape. This usually only works out in one of two ways, but I’m not—not judging. Just surprised.”_

_“_ _Is it that odd?”_

The mental-Ren floundered for an answer, his mouth working like a fish’s, the occasional noise slipping through. The mental-Akira couldn’t watch him after a while, and turned instead to the staircase. Yusuke followed, dutiful as ever.

Was it that odd? Had it truly never happened here, where men and women could see into each other’s hearts? Was there never a time where one of them kept the deepest, darkest parts of themselves hidden away until they found the one who could accept them?

 _“_ _It’s not weird!”_ the mental-Ren finally shouted, still at the base of the stairs. _“It’s_ not _weird! I’m—I’m rooting for you!”_

 _“_ _What does that mean?”_ the mental-Akira asked, more to himself through the low tones.

The steps on the stairs were fairly shallow, and the light tapered off after a turn so gradual even Yusuke barely noticed it. Their progress slowed to a crawl as the mental-Akira picked out each step until they were back in darkness again and Yusuke couldn’t tell if they were moving or standing still anymore.

The mental-Akira groaned. _“It feels like I’m going to fall. If there’s a cliff we won’t even see it—isn’t that terrifying?”_

They climbed. The mental-Akira grimaced and clung to the robot’s frame the higher they went, then said, _“Actually, I used to be scared like this all the time. Since I couldn’t make friends I thought it was only a matter of time before my classmates turned on me for one thing or another. And—you know how it is, that—that pressure to do well, to get into a good school and get a good job that pays well. I wasn’t that interested in anything in particular, so it would hound me until late into the night: Could I get into a good school? Could I get a good job?_

_“And then I came here, and that turned into: Can I survive until tomorrow? Can I ever go back home? Will I—will I even be able to take Goro with me, if I can? If it comes down to a choice between the two of us, how will I react? Will I throw him away like everyone else has so I can go home, or will I give up what I want so he can be happy?”_

_“_ _Now, that doesn’t sound like you at all,”_ the mental-Renall said, and Yusuke sighed.

The former Prime Minister of Ra Ciela, second only to the Emperor—and the reason Akira was in this mess to begin with. Renall had been the one to sign off on the details of the procedure to bring him to the dying world; Renall had been the one to subject him to years of torture to ensure that he was knowledgeable enough to succeed in the Trials; Renall had, ultimately, been the one to oversee the select few of humanity as they entered cold sleep to wait out the millennia until Akira could be recovered. Nothing had worked out the way she planned it, and Yusuke wondered where Akira got the confidence to look her in the eye and tell her it wasn’t her fault.

But that was good, wasn’t it? That he could forgive where others would hold grudges, and that he could look at it so objectively. It was all for the good of Ra Ciela, and Akira clung to that excuse.

Maybe—maybe he simply wasn’t one to hate others. Maybe it wasn’t in his nature—he could pretend at it, tease the edge of it, but it would never go anywhere.

 _“_ _You’ve managed to find a way every time life places an obstacle in your path, Ionasal,”_ said the mental-Renall, the slight wrinkles around her eyes deepening as she smiled. _“There’s no reason to think you won’t be able to this time as well, is there?”_

 _“_ _The energy requirements would be astronomical,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“I could never ask anyone to die for me; it would go against everything we’ve fought for.”_

_“_ _You make it sound as if there’s only one way, as if you’ve one single path to follow. Have you truly exhausted every option?”_

The mental-Akira stiffened. _“You don’t want us to go.”_

_“_ _It is only another option. Another path.”_

_“_ _It would be—I could do it,”_ he said, tugging at his hair. _“I could do it. A Song of acceptance, from the people of this world to Goro and I. There wouldn’t be any problem if we did that; we’d become part of the cycle of life here, but…”_

 _“_ _Dear Ionasal,”_ the mental-Renall said, moving in close to cup his cheek. Yusuke blinked at the stars that came into view, as multitudinous as they were from the top of the Star Singer’s Platform. Darkness gave way to a velvet sky and the sheer drop of the end of the staircase as it cut off mere inches from their feet. _“It is only one option. No one says you must take it. No matter what you decide—whether to stay or to go—we are your friends. We will stand by your decision and help you reach it. It will be the least we can do, after all you’ve done for us.”_

_“_ _You make it sound so simple.”_

_“Because it is. You decide, and that is all there is to it.”_

_“Even if you don’t like it?”_

_“_ _We wouldn’t be very good friends if we stopped supporting you for what we believe is one bad decision,”_ she assured, and Yusuke’s heart stuttered in his chest. Whatever the mental-Akira said next was lost as he rolled over in bed, breathing to keep the panic down.

This was—this was not just for Akira. This was for Yusuke as well.

How long had he known? Had he just suspected? Was it all a coincidence? It—it couldn’t be, could it, for two people’s problems to line up so perfectly: the desire for at least one person to stay by his side; the fear of losing the trust of his friends; the immense guilt as the weight of the things he had said and done crushed him alive; the vast, echoing emptiness of an uncertain future with an undetermined path.

Here it all was, boiled down into its most basic elements, the words of these projections speaking directly to Akira’s heart. He would lose none of them, for any reason. They would stay by him until the end of time itself.

And Yusuke—

Yusuke had pushed his away, and locked himself up like a criminal. He wallowed while his friends walked in the sun, warmed through the lights of their friendships and the blazes of their loves.

And Yusuke had pushed his away.

 _“_ _You’ll have to be careful getting up there,”_ the mental-Renall was saying as Yusuke jerked back to the app and Akira. Akira was the one who needed him right now, not his friends—if they were, in fact, still his friends—and Yusuke had to help him as the mental-Renall pointed off into the distance. The stairs continued to curve along her arm, and the mental-Akira, renewed by whatever she had told him, only nodded and began the climb.

Yusuke waited until they were once again surrounded by darkness. The mental-Akira stopped again, confusion in his knit brow. _“Do you think someone else is going to pop up, or is this the spot where we have to sort out our differences? There isn’t anywhere else to go, after all.”_

**You’re limiting yourself again.**

_“_ _Am I?”_ he asked with a laugh. _“I was only thinking that’s been the pattern this time. All the things I can’t say—all the things I can’t bear to hear because they don’t feel real—they’re all coming out here, just like Morgana said.”_

**All of them?**

_“_ _Ah, maybe not—maybe not everything, not exactly. But those are words for the real me to say, not the me here. They’ll, I don’t know, lose impact if I do, I think.”_ He sighed. _“But it really is dark here. What else could be left to say?”_

**I don’t know.**

_“_ _And I don’t either. But we’ll figure it out, we always do—or, you do, don’t you? It’s—it’s nice, to have someone reliable around, you know?”_

Yusuke knew. That brief pit of despair he’d sunk into as Nakanohara dived into his painting, so much like that odd, shaken feeling Yusuke had hoped he would never experience again after waking up in the hospital and being told his Sensei was being arrested. Nakanohara had been so reliable, until he wasn’t.

**It is.**

_“_ _Maybe it’s something simple this time,”_ the mental-Akira mused, _“like how much I believe in you. You’ve kept coming back, after all this time, when before—before there wasn’t anybody who stuck around long enough, except for, well, you know.”_

He paused. _“Do, uh, do you believe in me, too? That I can do the things they say I can?”_

**I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.**

It wasn’t quite the truth. Yusuke was only here to help Akira and Goro return home and nothing more, but he supposed belief had crept in at some point. This was the sort of world where the dead could be brought back to life with soul gems and time travel and where songs could weave protections strong enough to save an entire city from deadly solar bursts.

And—and it was Akira, too, his hand slick with sweat from a fever that refused to die, pushing himself to beg for another ounce of strength, no matter what it cost. It was the fire in his eyes that refused to be extinguished even as they continued to traverse the worst of what mankind had to offer: hatred and bigotry and a god-complex so strong it was already ripping the Soreil to pieces.

Well, maybe it was the truth, then, that Yusuke believed in him.

If he didn’t, what else would propel him to continue on like this?

 _“_ _I see,”_ said the mental-Akira. _“I’m—I’m glad to hear it.”_

He unlatched himself from the robot’s side for the first time since they’d left Morgana’s grassy hillside. The few steps he took echoed in the still air, confident ones that said no matter what, he was safe here, at the top of an unknown hill with his biggest protector at his side.

The world brightened. It should have been strange, how easy it was, but all Yusuke felt was a gnawing sense of jealousy: that it was easy for Akira because his friends were still here and still believed in him and Yusuke was part of that, somehow.

“Love makes us fools,” he reminded himself, and took in the new scenery: a starlit garden overlooking the night sky and the rolling hills, wisteria trees soft and fluffy at the fringes and a prim, white-painted gazebo bedecked with a set of small, delicate chairs and a table.

 _“_ _Oh,”_ the mental-Akira said, taking in none of it. _“One of the stars is out.”_

He was right: up in the starry sky was another small patch of darkness, like a black hole. Yusuke’s breath drew tight in his lungs at the sight.

There was only one thing it could be.

 _“_ _How do you think we’ll reach it?”_ the mental-Akira asked. _“There’s no path up there. If we could fly it wouldn’t be a problem, but…”_

**Or course we can fly.**

The mental-Akira turned to look at him then, the question on his lips dying before it could do more than whimper. Those lips quirked into a smirk. _“You’re right,”_ he agreed. _“We can fly, can’t we? Together—we’ll support each other together, won’t we?”_

He offered his hand. Yusuke stared at it through his phone screen and finally thought he felt what Yuuki had gone through, those first few years with Akira: loneliness clawed at his insides and screamed through his veins and here was Akira, saying he knew they could make miracles happen. Here was Akira, believing in him entirely and trusting him to see this through to the end.

Here was Akira, no longer the lonely boy Yuuki had been forced to leave but a man in his own right, offering up the one thing he had likely told himself over and over to never give: his deepest, most sincere feelings.

Yusuke touched the screen and swore he could feel them: admiration and affection, determination and drive, a stubborn will born out of loneliness, that desire to be where he belonged—and love, too, love for the man behind the screen, gentler than the fierce fires of his love for Yuuki but still there. It was the kind of love that would be etched into his heart for eternity.

Yusuke didn’t deserve it. After the awful friend he’d been—after the things he’d said—after what he had and hadn’t done—

 _“_ _Don’t cry,”_ said the mental-Akira. _“I can’t see you doing it, but you are, aren’t you?”_

He was. He was an awful human being, raised to be nothing more than another piece in Madarame’s extensive resume. He didn’t know how to love like this, gentle and warm and protective.

 _“_ _You’re not,”_ protested the mental-Akira. _“You’re not, and you do. You’ve just forgotten how. That’s what happens when you’re so—so despondent_ _the whole world feels as if it’s against you_ _. I know that feeling a little too well to sit back and let you sink into it, understand?”_

The feeling he had likely had after Yuuki made him cut the connection. This was almost the same, but Yusuke could technically see any of his friends anytime he wished—if he staked out Leblanc or sent texts in large chunks like Futaba—even if it felt as if he couldn’t anymore.

They were different, and yet they were the same.

 _“_ _You thought that before, I think,”_ warned the mental-Akira. _“How about—try not thinking. Just focus on me—”_

(“Focus on your breathing, Yusuke,” his therapist said during a particularly bad breakdown in his office. “Count with me, now. One, two…”)

_“_ _Yes, like that. Focus on me. I’m right here; I can’t leave even if I wanted to. Not anymore. We’re—we’re going to get through this, together.”_

“Together,” Yusuke said, and was surprised by how his voice cracked. He’d been going at it alone for so long, relying on nothing other than Yuuki’s second-hand information and his website. He thought Akira would hate him if he knew the truth. He thought Yuuki would hate him if he knew the truth.

Look where that had gotten him.

 _“_ _No,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“You’re right where you belong. I need you the same way I needed Yuuki; I might not love you the same way, but that’s alright, isn’t it? You love him too. That’s who we’re doing this for—for Ra Ciela and my dear friends and for Yuuki.”_

“For Yuuki,” Yusuke repeated. “For Yuuki.”

And they breathed; Yusuke matched his to the mental-Akira’s on reflex, to keep the sobs from catching in his throat. He was an awful friend, but he was still a friend. Nothing had been broken beyond repair quite yet, and with the right words he could fix it.

(Words like _Akira is coming home. I helped him. I think we’re friends now._ )

And Yusuke swore he could feel their hearts, beating ever closer to the other until—for a single moment, no more than one singular beat—they were in sync.

That single moment was all the mental-Akira needed. The screen beneath Yusuke’s hand burst into light, and when he checked to see what had happened, the mental-Akira was petting a large white fox easily the size of a bus. There were markings on its fur like those he had seen on fox masks as a child, and its paws and tail were tipped in red, as if drenched with blood or paint

 _“_ _Oh, he’s so soft!”_ the mental-Akira exclaimed as the fox let him pet his head and scratch under his chin. The breath blowing the mental-Akira’s hair had to be warm, too, and he laughed in it, though the muzzle alone could hold nearly his entire body.

The fox seemed to be enjoying the attention, however, and Yusuke was sure whatever this thing they had created together was, it wouldn’t eat him, even if its fangs were impressively—and rather terrifyingly—large.

 _“_ _You’ll take us up to that dark spot, won’t you?”_ the mental-Akira cooed to it, and the fox’s eyes rolled in its sockets as he scratched at a new spot, closing to slits in sheer pleasure. Its body sagged to the ground, and the mental-Akira took the chance to run to its shoulders, grabbing at fistfuls of fur to haul himself up. Yusuke moved the robot up behind him, and the fox stood and shook itself lightly and then leaped over the balustrade.

Common sense dictated that it would fall, and carry the mental-Akira and the robot to their untimely demises. The world inside of Akira’s heart didn’t adhere to those rules; the fox instead ran on air, much like the reindeer Yusuke could still recall from a long-ago Christmas story, or like a god or spirit in the tales of old.

Yusuke tried not to dwell on it too much. The mental-Akira said, _“I told Yuuki a story like this once. A prince rode on the back of a dragon, creating filaments to light up the night sky. One day he stopped on a little planet, and the world went dull and dark. I could never tell him the ending: that the prince woke up and found he was just a boy, and that his life was dull and boring. There was nothing to spark joy or sorrow or pain for that boy, so he lived on in an empty gray world.”_

He reached out to touch a cluster of stars as they passed by, and the stars swung in place long after they were gone. _“I didn’t want to give it an ending like that, but it was the only one that came to mind at the time, and then I got too busy to give it a new one. One I liked, and one I thought Yuuki would like, too, because—because I’m sure that if that boy only met someone who cared about him, his life would have been bright. That’s what Yuuki did for me. That’s what he did for you, too, and we did the same for him, didn’t we?”_

 **We did** , though Yusuke couldn’t be sure how much he had personally contributed. Certainly not as much as Akira believed, or Yuuki would have stormed the apartment with Ryuji. Yuuki would have tried to do… something. Help him, listen to him, anything at all other than the silence that had persisted for days, now.

 _“_ _I’ll admit I worried,”_ the mental-Akira said, as they drew closer to the dark star. _“What kind of person would I find on the other side of the screen? Would they like me? Would they help? And I—I got you. You, who loves Yuuki as much as I do. You, who knows the name Yuuki gave me that I love so much I want it to be my own. You, who’s stuck by my side throughout this whole crazy journey. I thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it, if the person on the other side of the screen wasn’t Yuuki, but I was wrong. I was wrong.”_

He was turned in his seat, smiling and crying from the force of the wind as the fox leaped and ran and bounded ever closer to the dark star. _“It’s just as much fun as it would have been with him,”_ he said, and laughed.

But you haven’t been having fun, Yusuke wished he could say. You’ve been fighting for your life. You’ve been fighting for the lives of everyone around you. You’ve laughed, yes, but you’ve cried and grown frustrated and fought your own friends for your beliefs.

But the journey was the same, Yusuke realized. Across thousands of apps and thousands of users, the overarching story was be the same: destruction and death and the excitement of a high-stakes game watched and played from a distance. The journey was the same—

—but the players were not. There was no one else like Yuuki for Akira. There was no one else like Yusuke helping him along and giving him the support he wanted, rather than the love he craved—because no one could replace Yuuki, because no one could ever come close—and that was why they had all failed, in the end. They had wanted more than what Akira was willing to give.

After all, if one couldn’t travel with a loved one, wasn’t the next best thing to travel with a friend?

And Yusuke was that friend. Yusuke. Not Ryuji or Futaba or Ann; Yusuke.

 **Yes, it has** , he picked, and the screen flashed bright again. When it dimmed—not totally, not completely, but enough that looking at his screen didn’t cause his eyes to water—he looked.

Where there had been a dark star before—a hole in the fabric of an otherwise perfect starlit night—was now a bulb burning brighter than the sun across the world, illuminating the rolling hills and the ruins and the staircase sloping up to a grand temple and its cliffside garden. Yusuke could spot each of Akira’s friends from their vantage point atop the fox—Morgana and his curling tail squinting into the light, the mental-Kanon nodding solemnly, the mental-Ren jumping and waving, the mental-Renall wiping tears from her eyes—and the mental-Akira said, _“As long as you’re here, I can endure anything.”_

 **Anything?** Yusuke had to ask.

 _“_ _Anything,”_ he affirmed.

 **Even that?** he asked, gesturing to the distant figures of Akira’s friends climbing the staircase. The mental-Renall was having some trouble until the mental-Ren ran up and helped her.

The mental-Akira paled, then shook his head and blushed. _“Anything,”_ he repeated, and the fox began its slow descent back to the temple grounds.

_“_ _You’ll have to help me make sure they know it’s not you I’m in love with, understand? Morgana knows, but he’ll have too much fun keeping quiet about that and letting everyone else come to their own conclusions.”_

As revenge for leaving him behind and waking up, yes, Yusuke could see that happening. **You’re going to tell them?**

 _“_ _Not here,”_ the mental-Akira said. _“They won’t remember it, and there are still some of them missing. I’d like them all to know, and I kind of don’t want to have to say it twice, you know? So I—I want them to be ready for the possibility of it. That’s all we can really do here, and…_

_“And it’ll give the real me the courage to say it.”_

That was what they were here for, after all—the things the real Akira couldn’t say, out of fear of being rejected by his own friends—he needed courage to do it, but the fear was far more pervasive, enough to darken his own heart.

They watched as the mental-Ren and -Renall headed into the temple. Morgana ambled up the stairs at his own pace, stopping occasionally to snicker to himself. The mental-Kanon paused to examine the garden and… picked some flowers. Enough for a bouquet or two.

The mental-Akira groaned into fur. Yusuke, for the first time since he had woken, got out of bed to pace his bedroom floor.

“Yusuke?” he heard from the other side of the door. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, I—” he cleared his throat. “I am only thinking, Nakanohara.”

Flowers, and a temple fit enough to be a church, and at least three of those representatives of Akira’s friend’s hearts believed they were in love, and Morgana kept stopping to laugh. He knew, that bratty cat-boy.

He knew, but he wanted to watch it play out anyway, to revel in the disaster of ruining dreams of a fancy mental wedding.

Had Yusuke—had he committed some faux-pas by Diving here? Had he committed to a wedding by agreeing to do this, or was it just like Akira said, that they had to squash any ideas that the two of them were in love in the mental space of the Soulscape before it was truly believed in reality?

It was too much. It was too strange.

“I’ve never known you to pace while you think, Yusuke,” Nakanohara said, as the fox landed in the garden and lolled on its side, allowing the mental-Akira and the robot to slide off.

“I am—trying something new,” he said, bumping into his stool. The fox wrapped its tail around the gazebo, resting its head upon folded paws and yawning.

“That doesn’t mean you have to pace in there, does it? It must be cramped.”

Morgana wandered over, grinning like the cat that caught the canary and still got its cream. _“Nice work,”_ he said, and snickered.

Cramped did not even begin to describe it: Yusuke was pushing tubes of paint and a few cans of potato sticks out of the way and still was coming perilously close to banging his shins into his bed frame or the easel. “I am quite fine, I assure you,” he said, sounding nowhere near fine enough for Nakanohara to believe him.

But the other man sighed through the door and said, “Well, alright, then. I’ll—I’ll be heading to bed soon, so you can pace outside then, if you wish.”

 _“Aw, come on,”_ Morgana was saying as Yusuke tuned back into the app after a hasty acknowledgment, _“it’ll be fun. And you don’t want to trample all over their expectations, do you?”_

 _“Expectations have nothing to do with this,”_ the mental-Akira said.

_“Why, it’s got everything to do with this! Do you realize how rare this is, Keeper? For a bonded pair to come this deep, and for it to happen not just once but twice to the same person?”_

_“Well, it’s—”_ the mental-Akira said, touching his heart. _“It can’t be that rare.”_

 _“Too bad, it is,”_ Morgana said bluntly. _“At least let them celebrate.”_ He grinned. _“And you can wear—”_

_“No.”_

_“But I even saved it just for an occasion like this! Do you want to waste all that hard work you put into it?”_

_“It’d be a waste to wear it for no good reason!”_ the mental-Akira objected. He turned to the robot and Yusuke (who had paused by his tower of snacks and was contemplating reorganizing them by expiration date, as he should have been doing in the first place, and trying to avoid becoming part of the conversation) and said, _“Say something!”_

If this was to be a wedding, then Morgana could only be talking about Akira’s bridal gown, but that had been a far more important occasion than this. A real wedding warranted dress such as that, not… whatever this was going to become.

**If he doesn’t want to, then he shouldn’t. You should respect that.**

Morgana clicked his tongue and pouted. _“You’re just no fun, are you?”_

 **You should respect that** , he chose again.

 _“He’s right, Morgana,”_ the mental-Akira said, kneeling down to look the cat-boy in the eye. _“He’s not the one I’m married to. He’s not the one I want to get married to again. Please don’t push this anymore.”_

 _“Ugh, fine,”_ Morgana groaned, before stomping his foot and pointing at the temple. _“But you can’t stop me from laughing at their faces when you tell them!”_

 _“_ _I wouldn’t expect you not to,”_ the mental-Akira said. He stood up, brushed imaginary dust off his shorts and sash, and turned back to Yusuke. _“So, uh. Shall we?”_

 **After you** , he picked.

 _“Ah, right,”_ he said. The confidence in his stride only lasted until they were directly in front of the doors, where he wavered, touching his heart and tugging at his hair. Yusuke could practically feel Morgana’s agitation through the screen as his precious Lighthouse Keeper waffled over whether to go inside or not; he ducked from behind the robot, under the mental-Akira’s elbow, and threw the doors wide open.

The insides of the temple resembled those of the churches Yusuke had originally envisioned in Kanda: the grand, open space lined with wood and stone pews; the altar at the other end of the room; the high, high ceiling with its exposed beams; stained glass windows lining the highest points, their images geometrical nonsense but aesthetically pleasing; the simple chandeliers lighting up what the windows couldn’t reach. Flowers bedecked nearly every available surface; petals swam through the air like dust motes.

Akira’s friends looked awfully proud of themselves. The mental-Renall wiped tears from her eyes as Morgana ducked behind the closest pew, leaving the mental-Akira and the robot to walk down the aisle by themselves. The mental-Ren whooped and hollered; the mental-Kanon kept her hands folded in reverent prayer.

They were clearly invested in this wedding. Yusuke dreaded what they would do if they didn’t get what they wanted; would they act like spoiled brides—or in the mental-Ren’s case, a spoiled groom—and demand what they wanted regardless?

Yusuke hoped not. To come this far, to have friends who had said they would support him no matter what, and then to be thrust aside as soon as their expectations weren’t met?

Akira would never recover. No wonder he had worried himself into a frenzy over this; Yusuke was getting nervous, too, and knocked his tower of cans over. Sorting his paint always helped him relax, and this would be no different—

 _“Ion!”_ the mental-Ren called, too impatient to keep waiting by the altar. He bounded over, then pulled a face at what the mental-Akira was wearing, a question sparking to life in his eyes.

The mental-Akira cut him off. _“Let’s go meet with the others, first,”_ he said.

 _“Yeah,”_ said the mental-Ren. _“Sure thing.”_ He followed close behind with a puzzled look on his face, one that was mirrored by the others waiting by the altar.

 _“Ionasal?”_ the mental-Kanon asked, concerned. _“Just what is going on?”_

 _“If you’re having second thoughts—”_ the mental-Renall began, stopping when the mental-Akira shook his head. The mental-Ren retook his place by her side, and they waited as the mental-Akira looked one last time to the robot—to Yusuke—for a bit of extra courage.

 **You can do it** , he picked, causing his new tower of cans to fall over.

The mental-Akira touched his heart, muttered, _“I can do this,”_ and stripped off his gloves. There were rings on his fingers, painted to be as close to the ones Yuuki bought, and even Morgana gaped as the mental-Akira displayed them and proclaimed, _“I’m already married! So there’s no need for another one!”_

This time Yusuke’s elbow jerked into _Desire_ , the thick paint crackling under the pressure.

 _“_ _Already—”_ someone in the app screeched, the pitch too high to place.

 _“Married,”_ the mental-Kanon breathed with a touch of despair, as if she was watching a car wreck in slow motion and knew every participant was doomed to die.

 _“To who?!”_ the mental-Ren screeched again, and Yusuke only placed the voice this time because he also threw himself at the mental-Akira, grabbing at his shirt and shaking him.

The mental-Renall was the calmest one there, and replied, _“To the one who helped him before. It would be the most obvious answer.”_

 _“So,”_ the mental-Ren growled, _“so we set all this up—for no reason?!”_

 _“Married,”_ the mental-Kanon said again.

 _“Tell me about it,”_ Morgana chirped from his seat. He lounged on one of the front-row pews, tail jerking back and forth. _“Keeper here doesn’t want to get married_ twice _. Talk about a let down.”_

 **Don’t make this worse** , Yusuke picked.

 _“You knew?!”_ the mental-Ren turned his throttle-hold to the robot, gripping ineffectually at the robot’s sides. _“You knew, and you didn’t tell anyone?!”_

**It wasn’t my place to.**

_“I wanted to tell you,”_ the mental-Akira said, smoothing out the wrinkles in his shirt, _“but I never found the time to, and you were always busy when I thought I’d have the chance to talk about it, and then I… just thought you wouldn’t accept it, either. Because it’s—it’s weird, isn’t it, to hide it in the first place.”_

 _“Married,”_ the mental-Kanon said again, eyes closed and hands folded. Her lips trembled. _“I—I wanted to see it.”_

 _“Yeah!”_ the mental-Ren agreed, his ponytail shedding hair to get in his eyes. _“What she said! How could you get married and not invite us?!_ _We’re your friends, aren’t we?!”_

The mental-Renall chuckled and said, _“I think it wasn’t a matter of he didn’t want to, but rather that he couldn’t. If he married the one who helped him before, he would have still been trapped in that dream world, wouldn’t he?”_

 _“But… I wanted to see it…”_ Kanon sighed.

Morgana grinned. _“I still have—”_

 _“No,”_ the mental-Akira said, at the same time the mental-Ren exclaimed, _“Yes!”_

 _“Just once!”_ the mental-Ren pleaded.

_“No.”_

_“Not even for a minute?”_

_“No.”_

_“I can’t even look at it and imagine you wearing it?!”_

_“No,”_ he said, more firmly than before, though the flush on his face wasn’t helping him look so stubborn on the matter.

The mental-Ren noticed, though, and asked, _“Was it because you look awful in it?”_

 _“No—yes, actually,_ yes _, that’s the reason—”_

 **But you were** **lovely** , Yusuke picked, and knew it was the wrong thing to say as the mental-Akira collapsed to the floor, a blushing mess.

 _“He spent_ forever _making it, too,”_ Morgana chimed in over the mental-Akira’s high whine, _“so he had better have looked good in it! Imagine spending a year sewing together your own wedding gown—”_

 _“Morgana!”_ came the mental-Akira’s cry, unheeded as the others leaned in to listen better.

 _“—and learning how to do the makeup and style his hair, and then looking_ ugly _!”_

_“You promised not to tell!”_

_“Did I?”_ his cat’s grin grew wider. His tail thrashed. _“I don’t quite remember. Oops.”_

 _“_ _And—”_ he rounded on the robot this time, _“I can’t believe you knew about it!”_

 **I found out on accident** , he picked, because that, at least, was the truth. Yuuki hadn’t planned to tell anyone, but a slip of the finger and Futaba had seen the photo and promptly bugged him about it. He’d had no choice but to talk then, and Yusuke had devoted himself more to looking at the photo than to what Yuuki was saying. He remembered thinking that was the kind of man Yuuki wanted to marry and be in a relationship with. He remembered Akira’s glowing face and flushed cheeks that had nothing to do with makeup at all.

_“_ _That—that doesn’t mean you had to tell them!”_

**But it’s true.** Yuuki had even said so, and then cried.

 _“I believe the more important question here is how he knows, Ionasal,”_ the mental-Renall said.

The mental-Ren pouted. _“I can’t believe that the robot got to see it, but I didn’t.”_

 _“Yes,”_ said the mental-Kanon, coming out of whatever stupor she had been in. _“It—I don’t think it fair to keep this to yourself, Ionasal._ _This is a most joyous occasion after all; no pair has ever managed to attain such a deep connection. It should be celebrated!”_

And, more quietly: _“It wouldn’t be a marriage if you don’t wish it to be, but… I… I would like to see it, the realization of the deepest of bonds. I can only imagine what shape it would take in your heart.”_

The mental-Akira touched his, still flushed to his ears. He was wavering; he was going to give in so they could be happy, even if it was only deep in their souls.

Akira wouldn’t want to be married to anyone else, even if the ceremony was fake and the intention behind it good. Akira wouldn’t want this.

In fact, Akira _didn’t_ want this.

So Yusuke took the chance to snatch him up off the floor and ran from the temple, the mental-Akira thrown over his shoulder like a bag of rice. He squawked at the suddenness, and then laughed as the mental-Ren gave chase, only to stop in frustration as they climbed atop the fox again and leaped over the side of the balustrade. They watched as he stamped his foot, hair blowing wild in the wind of their passage, and glared.

The mental-Akira continued to laugh as the fox carried them down the cliff to the distant Hymmnofort lit like a beacon. After he calmed down, he said, _“Thank you.”_

**You act like it was only you I was saving.**

He barked out another laugh. _“I suppose not. But thank you, anywa_ _y, and not just for now—for everything you’ve done since we met, both in the real world and here—and for everything you’ve done on your side of the screen. It couldn’t have been easy, coming here and helping me, but you did, and it_ _can’t_ _be_ _easy to love him, too, but you do. Whatever it is that’s soured between you two, that love will prevail.”_

He went quiet as they landed; unlike the very, very distant bulb they had sparked back to life, the Hymmnofort was much closer to the temple. The mental-Ren, still a distant green speck, was now racing down the stairs in an attempt to catch them; the other three lounged at the gazebo, watching everything unfold. Morgana had the audacity to wave.

The fox was big enough to curl around the Hymmnofort door like a protective wall and still give them space to move around in; the mental-Akira patted its flank and said, _“Just… thank you. For being our friend, even though it must be hard to. It would be easy to distance yourself to save yourself the pain, but you didn’t. You came here and you helped me and you’re helping him, too, and that’s—that’s more than I can ever repay.”_

**Just come home.**

The mental-Akira opened his mouth to dispute that, thought better of it, and closed it with a smile. _“I will,”_ he said. _“I—I will, even if I have to steal the Soreil and enter cold sleep to do it. I will. I promise.”_

 **Good** , Yusuke picked. He rested his head on a stack of cans and wished that this made him feel lighter; instead he felt only the hot rush of nerves through his veins. Akira knew that something had gone wrong between Yusuke and Yuuki. How much else could he see? What, exactly, was he learning through this odd psychic bond of theirs?

Nothing too damning, Yusuke hoped.

The mental-Akira took the robot’s hand and led them to the door. Light spilled from between its cracks, and the mental-Akira reached for it with a hand that trembled.

 **We don’t need to** , Yusuke picked.

 _“I know,”_ the mental-Akira agreed before his smile turned wicked. _“_ _But I don’t want to stick around and listen to Ren complain he didn’t get to see me in that kimono I made. It was supposed to be just for Yuuki and Morgana and me, you know. No outsiders included.”_

 **I know** , Yusuke picked.

 _“I shouldn’t be mad he took a picture or that he showed it off,”_ he went on, _“but I also don’t want to wear anything like that again unless it’s for real. So you’d better take me home, understand?”_

 **Yes** , Yusuke picked, and touched the door on the screen at the same time Akira did.

He sighed and let his phone—hand and all—flop to the floor as the Song they had created was downloaded. There was paint on the boards. As used to the sight as he was, Yusuke felt the urge to clean it, knowing it would be fruitless: as soon as he went to paint again, there would be yet more paint on the floor. He would never escape it.

He couldn’t escape a lot of things, it seemed.

The real Akira was still dazed and leaned heavily on the glass of his Dive tube as the technician worked to collect the crystals and reprimanded in the same breath: _“—can’t believe you went Diving in such a state. You should be at home, resting. And_ you _,”_ he said, rounding on the robot with the crystals in his arms still dripping Diving fluid on the floor, _“should have known better than to_ _do_ _this! Just look at him! I’ve never met a partner who cared so little in my life!”_

 _“I would like a nap,”_ Akira croaked. Then he coughed and added, _“And some water.”_

The technician scowled, shoved the crystals at the robot, and dug a bottle out of a minifridge under his desk. Akira took it, tried to unscrew the cap, then laughed weakly when he realized it was one of Kanon’s Chelnotron drinks, pink and fizzy in its vacuum tube.

 _“Go home,”_ the technician ordered, pointing at the door.

Before they left he softened and added, _“Congratulations.”_

Akira leaned on the robot the whole way back to the restaurant, eyes slitted against the glare of the lights, his feet dragging, his drink sucked down one tiny sip at a time whenever he was steady enough to try. It was gone by the time they arrived.

So was Akira, asleep on his feet. Kanon ushered him off to bed and he refused to let go of the tube, cradling it as he laid down and the door swung shut behind him.

 _“So, how’d it go?”_ Ren asked.

**It went well.**

_“Good,”_ he said, _“because boy, is he going to hear it when he gets up. Do you have_ any _idea how dangerous it is to go Diving normally, much less when you’re sick? It’s bad, okay.”_

Delta nodded agreement. Casty appeared to think, and agreed, too.

_“If we’d lost Ion, we’d be screwed, understand? Royally screwed. The only other person I could pass the Imperial Vocal Chords onto would be Kanon, and let’s face it, she can’t be both Empress and Cosal’s Voice to the People. It wouldn’t be right.”_

_“If she even wanted them,”_ Delta muttered, more to Casty than to Ren and the robot.

 _“She was raised to be Empress. Of course she’d take them,”_ Casty responded.

 _“So,”_ Ren said, raising his voice to be heard over the chatter, _“what do you have to say for yourself, huh? You could have killed him!”_

Even Delta, convinced as he was that the person behind the robot—and therefore, behind himself—was a decent human being, looked over with concern in the set of his jaw. Casty’s stare turned icy, though her face barely betrayed a hint of anger.

How easy it would be to tell them, Yusuke thought as the app gave him the choice to do all of Akira’s work for him. **He isn’t Ion** would be easy enough for Yusuke to say, but he would be taking that chance away from Akira, and all of the worry he had been feeling would be for nothing.

 **He grappled with himself and won** , he picked, wondering how much of Ren’s anger was out of concern and how much was leftover from the Dive. He’d been tricked out of a wedding, after all. He had to be angry.

 _“_ _And what, exactly, does that have to do with Diving?”_ Ren asked.

 _“Father gives himself fevers from stress all the time,”_ piped up Shurelia from behind one of Ren’s enormous parfaits. The girl had been quiet for so long Yusuke had forgotten she was there. _“And he says that people make themselves sick with worry all the time,_ _too_ _. It’s just something like that, and the Dive must’ve fixed it.”_

_“And you couldn’t have said that before?”_

_“She did,”_ Casty said.

 _“I did!”_ Shurelia cried. _“_ _But a Dive can only do so much, you know._ _Unless it’s addressed in reality, it’s going to come back.”_

 _“He has been working himself pretty hard,”_ Casty said, contemplating. _“Has he even been getting enough sleep?”_

Ren groaned out something that sounded like, _“Typical,”_ before storming off behind the counter.

 _“If it helps him feel better I’m not complaining,”_ Delta said. _“Just—tell us next time, okay?_ _We were really worried. Ren was about to get PLASMA to search the city for you guys.”_

_“You’re damn right I was!”_

Delta sighed. _“Look, it’s late. We got so worked up wondering where you’d gone that I’m just… tired. A day or two of rest can’t be all that bad, right?”_

 _“We talked about this,”_ Casty said. _“You_ collapsed _. Interdimend is getting stronger; if it goes on for much longer, you might not have a body left when this is over. We can’t afford to rest.”_

 _“We have to,”_ Delta stated. _“_ _All of us, we’re all exhausted. If it wasn’t for Ion and me collapsing like we did, who would it have been? When? When we’re about to fight Zill? When we’re surrounded by enemies? We can’t risk that.”_

 _“He’s right,”_ Kanon said, reentering. There was a crease in her brow, one of constant worry. _“Ionasal barely made it back here, and the Bios Shop isn’t that far. I can’t imagine the stress a different planet put on his body, and if we had continued on as he wished, there’s no telling what kind of disaster could have befallen him—or us.”_

Ren huffed while stirring a pot. Casty shoved her hands on her hips and bit her lip, still with that frosty glare. Shurelia downed another spoonful of parfait and glanced up as it wobbled.

Rest would be good for them all, despite the dire situation—in fact, because it was so dire. They needed to stop before the worst happened.

Yusuke hadn’t, and look where he was now: lucky to be alive and out from under Madarame’s thumb and cared for. The weeks he’d spent in a hospital rehab center had been drab and gray and monotonous until Suzui showed up with her friends in tow. He’d dreamed in color for the first time since his near-death, and he had been afraid, once she left, that everything she had brought him would disappear—especially the quiet boy who sat on the side most days, never saying much and even then, very little of value. Yusuke had wondered why he continued visiting, if he was so uninterested, but never asked.

He should have asked. He should have done a lot of things back then.

It wasn’t too late now, but… it would be awkward. Yuuki might not want to tell him, or he might have forgotten, and Yusuke had to live with the results of his actions.

(Perhaps he could have won Yuuki’s heart first. If only he’d tried harder and puzzled out this feeling sooner, everything could be different. He would be happy. They both would be happy.)

And Yusuke was rather tired from tromping about in the rain for the better part of the day. The bath he’d taken before dinner had warmed him up but it hadn’t done anything for the tiredness pulling at his eyes or for the desire to roll over and shut them, even just for a minute. The rain was back, drumming a lullaby on his window.

 **Rest would be wise** , he chose, ignoring Casty and Ren’s shared glares and focusing on Kanon and Delta’s sighs of relief.

Delta even said so, with a slump to his shoulders; then he yawned, jaw stretching until it popped audibly. Casty made a noise of disgust. _“What?”_ he said. _“I’m tired. It’s normal to be, isn’t it?”_

 _“That doesn’t mean you have to be gross,”_ she said.

Delta went to argue, but another yawn forced its way out of him; he shook his head at her reasoning, then clapped the robot on the arm. _“It’s not gross, it’s normal,”_ he insisted. _“This guy gets it, right?”_

Yusuke had been taught to hide such displays behind a hand—or, if you were Ryuji, behind an arm—but there had been enough students at the atelier who hadn’t bothered to when they were deep in an artist’s fugue that he could understand it. **I do.**

 _“_ _See?”_ Delta said, with a grin. Casty rolled her eyes.

 _“Anyway,”_ he added, turning to the robot, _“I’ll walk you over to PLASMA. We can have some guy chat, too. It’ll be nice to finally get to know the guy in charge of me.”_

That was odd phrasing, but it was true. If Yusuke were in his predicament—and he had been in something close enough to it with Madarame—he would have questions of his own, especially since to Delta Yusuke was a faceless entity behind both him and the robot.

Casty huffed again. She didn’t wait to hear Yusuke’s response, saying, _“I’ll come get you in an hour, then.”_

 _“Great.”_ Delta grinned, though the effect was ruined by him seemingly staring at Shurelia, still eating her parfait. It appeared to finally have a dent in it, and she was avoiding making it fall over by standing atop the table and reaching her spoon above her head. Ice cream traveled down her arm to soak her dress.

Casty turned, saw the mess, and ran over. Delta led the robot to the door and they were outside before she started yelling. _“_ _So,”_ Delta said, _“lead the way.”_

That Yusuke could do even with his eyes beginning to droop; the streets of Felion were empty at this time of night, what residents were left heading to the safety of their homes as the PLASMA troops began patrolling. A Genomis pair went by, the woman Singing under her breath as her partner gave the robot and Delta a quick nod. The typical night sounds of the city were tinny from his speakers: the hiss of distant steam as it escaped a pipe; the quiet laughter of nocturnal Sharl as they played in Celesgarden; a mechanical thunk, the purpose of which Yusuke would likely never learn. Men and women and children laughed behind closed doors; blinds and curtains fluttered shut in windows; underneath was the metallic thump of their footsteps, the robot’s clanging, Delta’s heavier but softer in his shoes.

This was what they were trying to protect and save, these people living their ordinary lives, guilty of nothing but wanting a homeland to call their own, to feel dirt beneath their feet and the sun upon their faces and the coolness of a natural breeze. There were generations between the time of Ra Ciela and now, whole lifetimes where mankind knew nothing but the cramped quarters of the ship. Their souls yearned for the freedom of open sky and endless fields and vast oceans.

Yusuke didn’t know how they had survived this long on nothing but a dream and a promise.

Delta, despite his claim of wanting to talk, had been silent so far; Yusuke watched the group of Sharl in Celesgarden toss a ball around until one of them saw and waved, going back to their game only when they were out of sight.

 _“You really have been helping us, huh,”_ Delta said at last. _“And it hasn’t been the simple stuff, either, like fighting the battles. You’ve been Diving, and Ion’s co-manager of Kanon’s shop, and you helped Tattoria make that medicine. How come?”_

Because Yusuke couldn’t stand to see a child suffer through an illness. Because Yusuke hadn’t wanted Kanon to give up on life the way Amano had. Because there were holes in Akira’s heart that needed to be tended to, and if it couldn’t be Yuuki, it had to be him.

 **I want you to be happy** , he picked. It was the closest thing to what he was feeling and it was accurate. The general malaise of the ship was the best environment for Goro’s—no, Zill’s, because she had been using the boy for years, now—plans of genocide.

_“Cause you’re a nice guy?”_

**I am not nice.**

_“Can’t say that I get it. You’re not a nice guy, but you do nice things like this?_ _Plus, if you weren’t nice, the Sharl wouldn’t like you so much. Kanon even said so.”_

It was odd, to think of these people having enough time to gossip between the fights for their lives, but that was just what people did: they talked. Yusuke might not have engaged in conversation very much before the rehab center, but he had liked listening, and there were always conversations going on around him—except when those whispered conversations were about him. He never knew what to do when he found someone talking about him—but this was the robot, who was different from Yusuke. It didn’t even have a voice.

 _“You’ve made all of us so much stronger,”_ Delta went on, _“even Cass and me. I can feel that strength when I’m fighting, lately, and… you don’t have that, do you?”_

The marriage. In Casty’s last Genometrics, she and Delta had solidified their bonds with a ceremony and vows and that manifested as strength in the real world, the kind of strength they would need to protect one another.

Akira hadn’t wanted another marriage. He only wanted Yuuki in that regard, and Yusuke didn’t blame him.

**We don’t. He isn’t the one for me.**

_“Does he know?”_

**Yes. He asked me not to** —in so many words— **so I didn’t.**

 _“Can’t imagine what that would look like, anyway,”_ Delta mumbled. _“Not—not that it’s because it’s—you know—but because you’re a robot. It’s, uh. It’s just kind of weird to think about.”_ He took a deep breath. _“But—but that means Cass and I are the stronger team, out of the two of us. We’ve got more powerful bonds to rely on. So—what I’m saying is—”_

He broke off, a deep frown on his face. Then he said, _“Prim’s being controlled like I am. I heard Sarly and Ren talking about it,_ _and about how it’s farther along than mine is—or was_ _; they don’t want to fight her, and they don’t want Cass and me to fight her, but it’s going to happen. And when it does—_

 _“When it does, let Cass and me do it. Please,”_ he said. _“_ _Prim’s our daughter. If anyone has to do it, let it be us.”_

**Are you sure you can do it?**

His face went tight. Yusuke imagined it was the face of a man with no choice but to do the thing he dreaded most. _“I’m not. I’m not sure at all. But I—we have to try. If it comes down to it, I’d like our faces to be the last she sees._ _We_ _were the first. I though_ _t_ _it’d be fitting.”_

Fitting, he said, as he scowled at nothing in particular. Fitting, as though seeing her parents would make what they were doing to her—what they would have to do, if she was truly so far gone as to have no will of her own any longer—any better or any easier or—

 _“Please,”_ Delta said. _Don’t make me beg_ , he didn’t say, but he would, if it meant having this.

 **If it turns out you can’t do it** , he started, but Delta interrupted him.

 _“Then finish it, but make_ me _do it. Please.”_

What love, Yusuke thought. To be so attached and yet so afraid to do what was needful, wishing that it would never come to pass yet determined to do it anyway, if it did—had Yusuke ever experienced that love for himself in his lifetime? Had anyone ever loved him that way?

Perhaps his mother had, but she was lost to the fog of memory. Yusuke didn’t have so much as a photo to remember her by. He didn’t even know how much of his own features were hers or his father’s.

To be loved so fiercely… he envied that.

 **Alright** , he picked, and Delta shuddered with relief.

He shouldn’t have. Yusuke only wanted to see the results of that love for himself: how badly it would destroy them to kill her; how hard Prim would fight the control over her body to save them—

His knee jerked; the thought stopped dead there, and he felt shame crawl up his back in a hot wave. How could he be jealous of yet _another_ love, just because he had never experienced it? How could he want it to rip them all to pieces? Was it just so he could be satisfied when they, too, realized how much love could hurt them?

(They already knew that. They already knew, and they were in love and would fight their own daughter regardless of the pain it would bring them in the end. This was the part where he was supposed to believe that together, they could weather the storm of agony it would bring them.

He wanted them to be just like him, and at their own hands.)

He was disgusting. His soul was as ugly as _Desire_ —no, his soul _was_ _Desire_ , in its swirls and eddies of nauseating color. He wanted to consume what he had never had before; he wanted everything.

He was disgusting. There was no changing that.


	22. Summer Vacation, The Second Saturday

Ann Takamaki woke to a call from Makoto Niijima—and a few texts from Futaba, although Ann didn’t remember ever getting her number or LINE ID, saying she had better be grateful because Futaba was missing sleep to do this. Ann stared at her phone, trying to parse why Niijima would be calling _her_ , of all people, before she remembered last night.

Last night: cuddling on the couch with Ryuji, nothing better to do than watch TV while the roast cooked in the kitchen; Ryuji had held her hand at some point, and she had wanted and dreaded the kiss her brain had told was coming. He hadn’t, staring sleepily at the TV and just… enjoying touching her without being too into her space or making a move until his mom came home. Ann thought she liked the roast but couldn’t be sure.

Earlier than that: calling her mom to ask if those studio positions were still available and getting a _I’m not sure, Ann, sweetie, but let me check_ , and another call later saying yes, they were. Why? Did she have someone in mind?

Of course she did, she’d said. Even if Niijima didn’t want the position, the least Ann could do was try.

The phone stopped ringing. Then it started back up again.

Ann picked up this time, mumbling out a sleepy, “Hello?”

“Good morning,” Niijima said, sounding too chipper for seven. Ugh, it was too early for this. Couldn’t she have waited another hour or two? “This is Niijima, although I suspect you already knew that.”

“Yeah,” she grunted. Futaba had taken the liberty of putting Niijima’s number in her phone, too. She probably didn’t want to be a middleman.

“Is it true, then?”

“True?”

“The job offer,” Niijima said; Ann heard a vague, high-pitched cry that might have been her friend’s rumored kid. Maybe they were having breakfast.

Ann felt oddly lazy, then. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s true. Why? Don’t you want it?”

“You’ve forgotten there’s usually a lengthy process involved in these kinds of things, Takamaki,” Niijima said.

“I haven’t,” Ann said. “If you have the job you can get a worker’s visa. You won’t have to enter the country illegally or whatever you were planning.”

“We have passports.”

“Those aren’t forever. You’d have to leave, eventually.”

Yeah, that was definitely a kid on the other end of the line. She kept squealing, and Ann wondered if Mishima was getting any sleep with all that noise—no wonder he’d looked so tired at the beach.

“Look,” she said, as Niijima did… whatever. “Just do the phone interview at least, okay? You can try, can’t you?”

“I have a record,” Niijima said, quietly.

“Lots of people in LA have records,” Ann said. Or it felt like it, anyway, with the weekly drunken brawls and the DUIs and everything else, but those guys had jobs, and if _they_ could hold jobs, so could Niijima. “Just prove you’ve changed and you’ll be fine.”

“That seems rather far-fetched.”

“Just do it,” Ann snapped. God, Niijima was dumb. Most people would jump at the chance of a new start in a new country where nobody would know them—but maybe she was wary because of the kid. “Just do it. Help yourself for once instead of worrying about everyone else—actually, no, let _us_ help _you_ this time around. Don’t try to carry this all by yourself anymore. We want to help you.”

The line went quiet. Ann got out of bed so she wouldn’t be tempted to fall back asleep—if she could, if Niijima hadn’t just pissed her off enough to keep her awake—and paced her apartment, sidestepping the clothes she’d scattered on the floor last night changing.

Then Niijima said, “Thank you.”

Wait, really? Was she really giving in so easy? Ann almost tripped over her own two feet. “Uh—no problem!”

“I will call them when they open, then,” Niijima said.

“Yeah!” Ann said, still shocked. “Great!”

And then the line went dead. Ann wasn’t quite sure what to do about that—Niijima didn’t _look_ like the type of person who just hung up like that, but, like Shiho had said, maybe she’d changed. Become less of a stickler for The Rules and more easygoing. That’d be a Niijima Ann would like to meet one day.

And Ryuji—she’d love to see his face when he found out. The great and powerful Niijima, telling Ann of all people thank you? He’d never believe it.

Ann could hardly believe it. She flopped back into bed, determined to call Ryuji—but only after she rested her eyes a bit, she was still kind of sleepy…

And fell asleep before she knew it.

* * *

Akira stirred.

Earthes wasn’t around for once; Akira knew that the person behind it had their own life to live and couldn’t stick around forever, but the loss felt deeper today than usual. Not as deep as when Yuuki hadn’t been around, but still… not there, when he used to be there. It helped that it commanded any room or street it wandered into, and without it, all eyes were on Akira as he stumbled into Delta’s—Ren’s—restaurant.

He’d forgotten what it was like to be stared at by a room full of people. Was it too late to crawl back into bed, or—

“Ionasal, good morning,” Kanon said.

Yeah, it was too late.

“Morning,” he said, through a throat drier than a desert. He felt gross, like he hadn’t had a bath in days. He didn’t want to know what he looked like as the rest of them said their good mornings—and, in Ren’s case, glared as he set down a bowl of porridge topped with an egg—but it probably wasn’t good.

“You should eat,” Kanon said, taking the bowl over to a table. She even pulled out the chair, braids swinging and catching on the back, her attire as neat and orderly as it always was. He knew she liked to wake at the crack of dawn to pray, and she was certainly more put-together than Delta and Cass were, glaring down at their bowls through eyes still bleary with sleep.

Sarly was coaxing Shirotaka into drinking some of her homemade vegetable juice; Shurelia gained enough of an interest in the taste that she stole the cup and downed it, her face growing pale at the bitterness of it. Someone rushed to bring her something sweeter.

A cool hand met his forehead: Renall, across the table, testing his temperature. She hummed approval. “It seems your fever has died. Perhaps that escapade last night was worth the risk, then.”

She sat back. Akira tried to resist the urge to tug at his bangs and only partially failed, his hands coming up to rest, as they usually did, at his heart. Whatever crystal was there flared warmth and longing and a happiness Akira hadn’t felt since Yuuki left. He was glad Earthes hadn’t taken it; he wasn’t sure what he would do without it there, keeping him going.

 _ **It’s strong**_ , Earthes had said.

Did he know what those words meant to Akira? Did he know what the crystal meant to Akira?

Did he know everything, or only bits and pieces?

“Are you feeling any better?” Renall asked, as Kanon brought over more porridge for the two of them. It was probably the only thing he could make without completely messing it up—or maybe someone else had cooked it, and that was why Ren was so angry.

“Oh, yes,” Akira said. He picked up his spoon and prodded at the bowl, remembering Kanon’s stern stares from yesterday. How she’d woken him every half-hour to eat _just one bite, Ionasal_ , until it was all gone. “And I—I’m sorry for worrying you.”

“It must have been serious, to affect you so,” Renall said. “From what the Dive technician told me, it wasn’t a normal cold.”

“He’s just been working too hard,” Ren said, still glaring at the pot, “like I told you.”

“This is a crucial time for us—”

Ren shrugged. “Every moment since we destroyed Ra Ciela has been ‘crucial.’ Some of us haven’t exactly had the time to take a break since then.”

“You mean as you have,” Kanon said, “taking over Delta’s shop?”

Delta started at his name. “Huh?”

“Why are you all so loud,” Cass groaned. “I know we were all worried last night, but he’s fine now, isn’t he? There’s no need to take it out on him now that he’s feeling a little better.”

Akira looked up from his bowl long enough to see Shirotaka and Sarly, over in their corner of the restaurant with Shurelia shoving Kanon’s ugly shortbread cookies in her mouth, giving each other knowing looks.

They were scientists before they were psychologists, but those were practically one and the same here, in this odd universe where anyone could peer into another’s soul with the right technology. They’d programmed the memory packs for him and Renall and had more than a passing knowledge of the inner workings of the mind.

Ren’s glare deepened. “I’m angry because I was worried! That stupid robot could have gotten him killed!”

Sarly hid a smile and adjusted her headband.

“Exactly,” Kanon said. “And if Ionasal does not eat, he won’t be strong enough to convey everyone’s hopes for the future to Cosal and finish the Heart of the Planet.”

Now Shirotaka did too, except he laughed quietly.

Renall sipped her drink and added, “Not to mention that now that he’s feeling better, this partner of his is nowhere to be found.”

“Pretty sure he’s just sleeping,” Delta mumbled through a mouthful of porridge.

Akira ate, mostly to avoid having to talk and deal with all of this tension. He knew they went Diving, and his heart felt lighter for it; conviction swirled in his gut like nerves. He was going to tell them soon—today?—but they weren’t angry about that. He had the feeling they’d listen, because they were his friends and they were here for him in a way no one on Earth had been—except for Yuuki and whoever was controlling Earthes.

He was sure of it, now. They were his friends. They wouldn’t abandon him over something silly like a name. They wouldn’t leave him just for that, and he knew that the person behind Earthes was here to stay, too, until the end of it all, however it turned out.

… He hoped it turned out well. He hoped the planet revival succeeded and he and Goro could find a way home. He wanted to talk to Yuuki again, wanted to see his face, wanted to watch the way his body worked as he talked and even when he didn’t.

“All irritations aside,” Sarly said, “ _do_ you feel better, Ion? Mentally, if what the Prime Minister said is true.”

 _Say it_ , his gut insisted. “I do,” he said; Ren slammed a serving spoon into the pot on the stove forcefully enough to splash him with porridge. Renall choked. Kanon’s knee jerked, causing her foot to hit him in the calf.

Shirotaka hid his face in his folded arms on the table and laughed. Shurelia popped the last cookie in her mouth and chewed.

“Oh,” Delta said. “Was it the last Genometrics?”

“Delta,” Cass hissed, “that’s rude.”

“What? I’m just asking.”

“That doesn’t make it okay. What in the world is the matter with you?”

“Well, it’s just—” Delta said, making vague motions with his hands, “it’s, you know, the _last_ one. Didn’t I tell you about it?”

Cass stomped her foot. “That doesn’t mean it’s okay to just _talk_ about it—”

Ren took the pot off the stove with a huff and said, “I feel cheated. Dunno why, but I do, and it’s all the robot’s fault!”

“I feel as if I’ve missed the chance to watch you grow up, Ionasal,” Renall said, frowning at her cup.

Kanon was muttering to herself: “Between the newly-forged Sharl-human pairs that have begun to spring up of late, a handful of them have sought me out to give them a blessing in their—oh.”

“Oh,” Sarly said, mockingly.

“Oh?” Shurelia questioned.

“We live in a new age,” Shirotaka said, through fits of laughter. “Truly, we do.”

Kanon’s brow grew furrowed the longer she thought. “But Ionasal is a man, and as far as we’re aware, the one controlling Earthes is also a man. That—that can’t be right.”

“Who cares?” Delta said. “It’s just marriage.”

“Delta! I just told you not to talk about it!”

“That’s not what I meant! It’s not—it’s kind of like marriage, but you swear to protect each other and stay by each other’s side and—”

“That’s marriage,” everyone said, at nearly the same time.

Akira wondered if it would be possible to choke on porridge. Maybe if he inhaled it fast enough…

“It’s a ceremony of bonds,” Delta defended. “Which means they could go through with it even if they don’t want to get married!”

A ceremony of bonds. Being together forever, protecting each other, sharing the good times and the bad… it _was_ like marriage.

 _Never_ , Akira thought. _Never. Not with anyone who isn’t Yuuki._

“Ion?” someone asked.

_And definitely not with a robot—not if Yuuki’s not behind it!_

“Is his fever back?” someone else asked. “Someone check—Renall, he might let you do it—”

But Yuuki wasn’t behind it. Instead it was—was someone who loved Yuuki, someone who got to talk to him every day, someone who got to see all the expressions he could make, someone who could comfort him when he needed it.

Akira slapped Renall’s approaching hand away. The crystal in his heart ached like broken glass; his stomach was heavy. It was the porridge. Akira had taught Yuuki how to make omelet rice and his first attempt was something thick and sludgy but that washed down easily, even if all the textures didn’t mesh.

“Ion?” someone asked, carefully.

“Leave him alone,” Delta said.

“We can’t leave him like this, he’s going to rip his hair out!”

“Just be quiet!” he roared, and that was enough to get even Cass stunned into silence.

And in that silence Akira could hear a noise, a whimper like the creak of rusted metal flapping in a stray breeze. His throat hurt. His head hurt.

His chest hurt.

Earthes had said the crystal was strong. That meant the thoughts that had made it were strong, and what was stronger than marriage? What was stronger than an undying love? What was stronger than the bond he and Yuuki shared?

Definitely not the bond between him and a—a robot. Definitely not the bond between him and a _rival_. Had he really married some—some stranger from across dimensions just because he missed Yuuki? Had he really?

No. Never. Not in a million years and twice as many lifetimes.

 _Never_.

“Ion,” Sarly said softly, “is it the one who helped you before, in the dream?”

“Yuuki,” Delta said.

Akira had never mentioned Yuuki before. How could Delta, of all of his friends, know about Yuuki? Had the person behind the robot said something, let some tidbit slip, or was it some effect of Interdimend?

Akira wasn’t sure he wanted to know. What he did know was that he was crying in a restaurant with all of his Ra Cielan friends close at hand and was expecting a quip that didn’t come.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Delta went on. “Just, uh, nod or something.”

Nod? Nod to what? What were they asking? Was it if he was married to Yuuki, or whether he would marry the robot, or whether he’d prefer to be married to Yuuki, or—

Someone dragged a chair over—by the boots, it was Ren—and wordlessly put a hand on his arm. He let it rest there, and Akira didn’t try to stop him this time. A broad palm clapped down on his shoulder—Delta, from the voice that followed, mellowed by an understanding that Akira couldn’t fathom.

“You mentioned him the other day,” he said, as another hand rested next to Ren’s. Cass’s, if Akira had to guess. “Earthes said he wasn’t anybody on the ship.”

“Which means he’d have to be the one from before,” Sarly said. She took the hand gripping his hair and untangled his fingers from the strands; her eyes were soft and wet with tears when he could finally look up. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

 _Because_ , he thought. Just because. Because who would believe him—because who would let him indulge in the memory of Yuuki for a while, when there was so much to do and so many people to save—because it hurt to remember that Yuuki was dimensions away and not _here_ , where Akira could hold him close. Because he’d had to be strong again—be their Ionasal, Emperor of Ra Ciela.

“Because I miss him,” Akira managed to say, as Kanon and Renall rounded the table to hold him, too. Sarly thumbed his knuckles and nodded; Shirotaka, still over in his corner with Shurelia, dipped his head in shame.

Right, he’d—Sarly had thought he was five thousand years dead. She had grieved him and then tried to move on, and then it turned out he was alive and well, even if he was in a place he believed none of them could reach anymore. Sarly had missed him in a way that was almost too much to bear; he was her first love and her dearest friend both, and to lose him was to her what Yuuki’s loss was to Akira.

“And talking about it would only make it hurt more?” she asked.

He nodded. His friends were so warm. How long had it been since a real, live person had touched him like this, had held him like this? How many years had flown by between his last childhood hug and now? How much of that was his fault, and how much of it was a simple neglect of his parents’?

“Does it hurt now?”

It did, and he said so. The crystal still ached—his heart still hurt, as if glass was wedging itself in deeper into the muscle with every pulse—and his hands hurt, too, where Renall and Sarly gripped them. They were warm and solid and real and he didn’t want to let them go; if he did they would leave him like Yuuki did.

Shirotaka came over, his hair brushing Sarly’s shoulder as he leaned over and added his hand to the mix. His friends, his dear, dear friends…

His Council of Seven, reunited at last.

They deserved to know the truth, and he told what he could through a throat that barely wanted to cooperate: how he’d met Yuuki, how they’d grown close over the years, the simple support they gave each other. How by the time Yuuki had disappeared for a week with no notice Akira couldn’t imagine days spent without him; how lonely it was without him, and how angry Akira had been at the people who’d taken him away. How ecstatic he’d been when Yuuki had come back, how his heart had been so full with an emotion he’d been too afraid to name until then.

“Did he say the same?” Shurelia asked, crouched by his knees, violet eyes wide. “Did he say he loved you, too?”

She cooed when he nodded; artificial lifeform or not, Shurelia was a girl at her core, and if the sniffling from Cass was to be believed, his story was enough to tug at their heartstrings.

He’d felt Yuuki’s longing back then: a desire not to be alone anymore, and to not have to face the future alone, and to have Akira by his side, always. Even if what Yuuki had felt wasn’t quite the same love that Akira had felt, it was enough. That had been all Akira wanted.

And the year had wound down. Yuuki had gained friends and Akira had been happy for him, imagining the weekend homework binges and the parties and what they might all act and look like, together in a room where they were happy, even if Akira was still alone, in the end. Relegated to a corner so Yuuki could come over and chat when he wanted to, and there were, sometimes, foreign presences that seemed almost amused by the whole situation. Yuuki’s friends, Akira had told himself. Yuuki’s friends, taking an interest in what he was saying and doing even though he no longer had to impress anyone anymore. How all of that happiness came crashing down one day, and Yuuki had been so _hurt_ by it that Akira had blurted out what he’d been dreaming of for over a year.

“You didn’t,” Cass gasped, and slapped his back.

“I did,” he said. “I asked, and he said yes, and we got married—”

“You _did_!” This time she hit Delta; Akira slumped to one side as Delta propped himself up on Akira’s shoulder.

“What was that for?!” Delta grunted.

She couldn’t give a reason. If Akira had to guess it was because she was angry he’d gotten married before she did, or that Delta still hadn’t proposed even after they’d gone through her last Genometrics, or maybe the hits were how she’d learned to deal with her feelings.

He hoped she would work on that. Delta might love her, but it wouldn’t last forever at that rate.

“And then what?” Shurelia prodded, already bored with Cass’s flustered attempts at explaining herself.

 _I could hear him_ , he wanted to say. _We talked about so much. We talked about nothing at all. He was so happy and I was happy too and then—_

“I had to wake up,” he said. It hurt to admit it to his friends—they’d worked so hard to wake him up, to help him, and he’d been ready to turn his back on them all. “I didn’t want to; I wanted to spend more time with Yuuki, as much time as I could, because once I cut him off, there was every chance I’d never see him again. He got so angry at me for it. He said—”

_I’ll never come here again._

“—so many things to make me do it. It hurt so much. I still dream about it, sometimes; going back to that dream world and living there happily while you all—you all—”

While they all suffered. Could Akira say that his presence here hadn’t made things worse? Could he say that about the Imperial Succession Trials, too? Could he say that about his whole life?

“—or being there again but being alone, wishing and hoping he’d come back. I don’t know what’s worse.”

He went quiet. Tears dripped down his cheeks; they made his skin itch and his eyes burn but he could do nothing, for a moment, but cry. He wished Yuuki could be here, seeing the things he saw, experiencing them in real-time, instead of as a memory. He wished Yuuki could be here, period.

But he wasn’t. He wasn’t.

“Seems pretty simple to me,” Delta said, still breathy from Cass’s hit. “You guys had a fight, right? And you didn’t get the chance to apologize. That’s why you’re so worked up about it.”

“But I can’t apologize,” Akira said. “I can’t talk to him anymore.”

“So have Earthes do it. He’s from your world, isn’t he? He should be able to find a single person.”

Akira doubted it was that simple. The person behind Earthes was his rival for Yuuki’s affection; even now, when he wasn’t here, there was every chance he was trying to win Yuuki over.

(But something had gone wrong, recently. Yuuki had… betrayed him, somehow, and the wound was so fresh and so deep Akira could feel it through their telepathic bond as strongly as if it was being screamed into his ear.)

Which just meant there was no way he would convey Akira’s apologies, not if it meant giving himself a leg up.

“He’s right, for once,” Ren said. “There’s every chance we won’t make it through whatever Prim has in store for us next. There’s no way she’s going to see us trying our hardest to make everyone happy and not try to ruin it. She’s too determined. Get this out of your system so you can fight your hardest, Ion.”

Ion. Right, he’d been—he’d been worked up about _Ion_ , too, hadn’t he? His own friends wouldn’t call him by the name he’d chosen for himself—but only because they didn’t know. He’d never told a soul about Yuuki and Akira and the wedding or the fight, and—

Yuuki had, because Earthes wouldn’t know, otherwise. Yuuki was showing him off, talking about him, and Akira couldn’t do the same?

And this would be the best way to breach the subject, too…

“Only if you call me Akira,” he said. “Yuuki used to call me that, and I’d like it if you did, too.”

No one asked how he knew; Earthes’ telepathy was far more advanced than the one inside the dream, where Akira had gotten glimpses of base feelings whenever Yuuki felt like sharing. Earthes could speak whole sentences mind-to-mind and to more than one person at once _and_ his base emotions came through, clear as day.

Kanon was the first one to say it: “Akira. I see. It has sentimental value, and that gives it its weight.”

“Akira, hm? It’s a fine name,” Renall assured him.

“It might take some getting used to…” Sarly mused, echoed by Cass and Delta, who’d known him the longest as Ion. Delta had been his biggest supporter back when Ra Ciela still existed, and had been calling him that for years. Cass, too, now that he thought about it, although her enthusiasm hadn’t been nearly as astronomical as Delta’s.

“So you’re like me!” Shurelia chirped, hugging his knees. “Father gave me some boring name—I like this one much better, _and_ it makes him happy!”

Shirotaka was the only one who didn’t comment. He’d changed his name when he began living on his own, and his real one was tied to so many painful memories that he could probably guess why Akira wanted to change it now: Ion wasn’t just the savior and last Emperor of Ra Ciela, he was made to be that way. Akira had spent months—maybe even years—trapped in a cell, the culture and language being shoved down his throat and beaten into his brain. He still had the scars to prove it.

Shurelia was right about one thing, though: being called Akira did make him happy. Akira was who he wanted to be; Akira was the one he’d become with Yuuki by his side.

Now he could face that uncertain future. Even if it was scary—even if it was terrifying not knowing what might happen over the next few days or weeks—he could do it, now. If his friends wouldn’t let him back down before, they definitely weren’t going to after all of this.

“Deal,” Ren said, grinning. “And after it’s all over, you’ve got a man to get back to!”

No, they definitely weren’t.

* * *

Surprisingly, Togo didn’t want to play shogi; she wanted to walk around Jinbocho and browse for old shogi strategy books she had yet to read and… not talk.

She was a naturally quiet person, like Yusuke was. That was understandable; what wasn’t understandable was her statement when he stepped off the train—“Let’s talk, Kitagawa.”—and the ensuing silence. He had no idea what she wanted to talk about.

(He had some ideas, but none of them were anything she would express interest in and therefore didn’t count.)

It was only after the fifth bookstore, as Yusuke was contemplating heading back inside for a—not quite rare, but uncommon enough that it would probably be difficult to find again and at a much steeper price than the shop had been selling it for—very intriguing art book, that Togo sighed.

“Kitagawa,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you about what happened last week at the mixer.”

“You’ve been doing rather poorly, then,” he said, eyeing the shelf through the window. The book was right there. His budget for not just this month but the next would be shot, but he could have it, if he wanted it.

(His budget was already shot after the mixer. Yusuke had no qualms about making it worse and feeling, if only temporarily, what it would feel like to be in debt, but that was a slippery slope none of his friends would be pleased to hear him beginning to slide down. Ryuji would be furious. Futaba would likely hack his phone or his bank account to keep him from spending any more. Yuuki would…

Yusuke wasn’t sure.)

“Only because I thought to give you space enough to speak first,” Togo said. “Something happened, or you wouldn’t be so… despondent. Don’t look so surprised; I’ve played you enough to read you well.”

And yet, he remembered her silence on the comments from the table in favor of the shogi board. She could eat and play, but she refused to think of anything else once the board sat in front of her and the opponent was decided. Was that how she gave him space, too?

“You’re angry,” she observed.

“Yes,” he said. They continued down the street at a leisurely pace, Togo’s umbrella knocking his leg on occasion. The day had been dry but humid, a remnant of yesterday’s rain and a promise of more to come, and the umbrella was just in case.

He should have brought one along, too. Just in case.

“Are you angry because I’m prodding at you, or are you angry because you don’t want to remember what happened?”

“Both,” he said, then took a breath—wet cement, musty pages as a nearby shop’s door opened, something vaguely unclean like rot in his nostrils. He couldn’t quite place it; perhaps it was yesterday’s rain, left to sit in puddles without so much as a speck of sun to dry it. “And at myself,” he added, and Togo nodded.

There was quite a bit there to unpack, after all. Angry at himself for the way he’d treated his friends, for the way he’d talked about them, for the way he couldn’t bring himself to admit it to their faces. Angry at himself for being a coward and not confronting Yuuki about his relationship with Yamada right there in the alley; angry because he didn’t have a chance. He’d never had a chance.

He told her as much as they walked along the streets of Jinbocho, in a voice quiet enough that it might not have reached her. She nodded through it all, occasionally sidestepping a puddle that Yusuke put his foot right down in, only noticing when the water began seeping through.

He said nothing of that. It was his own fault for not paying better attention.

When he finally ran out of things to say, his throat was dry and his voice cracking. Togo looked at him and said, “I believe you should tell him, Kitagawa.”

He coughed.

“You aren’t completely sure if he’s truly in a relationship with that Yamada boy, either. You need to talk to him. Don’t worry about the rumors or the gossip or any of that; _talk_ to him.”

“I can’t,” he said.

“Why not?” she demanded. “At this rate, you really will lose them all. If you talk to them, you’ll have the chance to explain yourself. If they’re really your friends, they’ll understand.”

He shook his head. She didn’t understand after all; she had no idea how disgusting he was on the inside, no idea how filthy his own heart was—

He ran into her. She had sped up, overtaken him, and now stood in front of him, glaring.

He shook his head again. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m a coward, Togo. It’s in my nature.”

The packed bags in the closet Madarame had never known to question. The wishing that someone—anyone, maybe even his birth father—would come to take him away and show him the love he wanted. Coming to the conclusion that he could never leave, Madarame needed him, Madarame had barely prepared him for a life outside of the atelier and Yusuke wouldn’t survive it, that he would become another homeless urchin like so many of Madarame’s other students. They liked to clog the streets of Shibuya every time there was an exhibition, and Yusuke could never meet their eyes as they glared and snarled insults. He could never remember their names. He doubted they remembered his.

Togo’s fierce glare softened only slightly at the admission. Her eyes flicked, off to the street and back, and he wondered what she was remembering. The Togo he knew and heard tales of was brave; he doubted she knew much of what it was like to be a coward.

But, finally, she did speak: “So you’re just going to run away from them? Forever? For the rest of your life, Kitagawa?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then stop doing it. If it hurts to face them, let me be there with you. We’re friends, too, aren’t we?”

“I—” he started, then stopped and sighed. She was right: they were friends. Yusuke had gone to a mixer despite turning down his fair share of them over the last half year just to keep her company, and Yusuke had then abandoned said mixer for Yuuki’s sake.

(He’d gone back in the end, but it was still the same, wasn’t it?)

And Togo was likely only worried because he was about to lose some of the dearest, most important friends of his entire life over a kiss in an alley. The Yusuke she remembered was friendless and miserable—and that was when she’d seen him at a distance, not when they had sat on the same pew and played shogi for hours and learned each other.

… And there was no turning her down, not with that look in her eye. She was fighting tooth and nail to reclaim her position among the shogi elites, rumors of more bribery be damned, and she would fight him, too. Yusuke was too tired to fight anymore. Yusuke was too tired to fight about anything.

“Alright,” he said. Togo smiled; he tugged his phone out of his pocket, glanced once at the app where Akira was waiting, and hovered over LINE, thumb shaking.

Togo’s smile dropped. “Maybe we should sit down for this,” she said, and he nodded, stiff with nerves, phone still held out in front of him. If he put it away he would never dig it back out again until he was home with nothing to do except stare at _Desire_ and check on Akira.

“You don’t want to call him?” she asked, once they were a block farther down the street with no bench or restaurant with outside seating in sight.

Yusuke thought, briefly, and decided that no, he did not want to hear Yuuki’s voice right now. Not in his ear, breathy and nervous, and not outdoors where anyone could walk by and see the effect it had. Yusuke was beginning to believe that his reactions weren’t normal—but was that only because of the inconvenience of them, or was an overactive libido just a result of a neglected upbringing, or was it just something else entirely?

“No,” he said.

Luckily Togo didn’t dispute it. She continued leading him down the street, her hand on his wrist, the umbrella swinging; he tried to think of what to say to Yuuki. What could possibly begin to fix this mess they had found themselves in?

Yusuke: **There’s something I’d like to talk about, if you have the time.**

He picked out the message over another street or two, confident that Togo wouldn’t lead him into the middle of traffic and then leave him there; it would be counterproductive, for one thing, and it wouldn’t make her a very good friend, for another.

Yusuke might not be a good one himself, but he’d never left someone in traffic. He wasn’t that cruel.

He expected not to get an answer right away, but it was only after they were seated in an obscenely-priced cafe that he did:

Mishima: **Yeah sure**

He didn’t like the sound of that.

And if the waitress didn’t like the fact that he was ordering water, she should just tell him. Everything else was rather out of his budget.

Mishima: **If it’s about last week Ryuji told me you saw**

Yusuke: **Yes, it was about that. I apologize for not speaking with you sooner on it; I was rather shocked.**

Mishima: **You can say it grossed you out I kind of figured that out by now**

He must have pulled a face at his phone; Togo leaned over the table, reading upside down. “Did it?” she asked.

“No,” Yusuke said.

Mishima: **Or that I’m a cheating whore who doesn’t deserve Akira I kind of figured that out too**

“Then just say so,” Togo said, leaning back to pull out her own phone.

Yusuke: **I’d prefer to say that I was not grossed out, just shocked, as I said. I did not expect you to be the type of person who did such things.** **Why did you do it?**

Cheating whore comments aside—at least Yuuki was aware enough to realize what he’d done could be seen as such, as much as it made Yusuke want to deny it—that was the crux of the issue: why? Why Yamada? Why not Yusuke?

Mishima: **You do know that if Akira forgives me I’m going to kiss him too right?**

Yusuke: **Yes. And?**

It would still hurt, but it would be Yuuki with the love of his life and not some… fling, if that was what Yamada was. It would still hurt, but Yusuke wouldn’t left to wonder if that could have been him, if he just had the courage to ask for it. Akira had been there first and Yusuke wasn’t about to begin crying over that.

Mishima: **Look I know you think it’s gross you don’t have to hide it**

Mishima: **Maybe you thought you’d be okay with it but seeing it was different idk**

Mishima: **Just tell me so** **I get it**

What in the world was he talking about?

Yusuke: **I think it’s rude of you to be kissing men like Yamada when Akira is doing his best to return to you.**

Yusuke: **I also think it would be rather hypocritical of me to think of two men kissing as gross.**

Yusuke: **I’m not sure what on earth made you think I would, but I assure you, I don’t.**

Yuuki took a long time to come back from that. Togo’s order arrived, and Yusuke sipped at his water and tried the game on her phone as she split the slice of cake in half: shogi, naturally, the AI opponent set to the hardest difficulty. Compared to Togo, it wasn’t that difficult.

She handed him half the cake and took her phone back. Yusuke ate it in three bites, wary of the waitress behind the counter mixing melon sodas for the pair of girls by the window; the frosting he licked from his fingers was nothing like the cheap confections of his childhood. It had depth to it, and before Togo had sliced it in half, looked very pretty on her plate.

Mishima: **You don’t? Are you sure?**

Yusuke: **If I wasn’t, I would say so.**

Mishima: **I mean you never SAID anything like that before how was I supposed to know**

Yusuke: **Was I supposed to say so?**

Mishima: **Yes! You were**

Mishima: **Or you should have**

Mishima: **I think you should have**

Mishima: **Don’t tell me the others know**

Don’t tell him he was the last to learn of it, Yusuke understood. But only Ryuji did, and that only because Ann had told him. Futaba wasn’t nearly so observant to figure it out on her own, either. Boss… well, Yusuke couldn’t be sure of what he knew or didn’t know, only that he wouldn’t say without permission.

Yusuke: **In any case, I wanted to apologize. Ryuji visited out of concern and I said some rather rude things about your character** **and was too afraid** —despondent and bitter, really, but how was Yuuki supposed to know that?— **to say the same to you, as he dared me. I’m sorry.**

Mishima: **Don’t think we’re done talking about that**

Mishima: **Not by a long shot**

Mishima: **And that’s a very wordy way of saying you called me a whore to Ryuji’s face**

Mishima: **Were you ever going to tell me?**

Mishima: **That I was a whore and that you were gay**

Yusuke: **I did just ask you why you did it. Although that doesn’t quite change the nature of it, does it?**

Because whether it was because Yuuki was genuinely in love with Yamada, or because he was lonely and seeking comfort, or because Yamada had forced him to, it was all the same in the end. Yusuke had been there long enough to hear both of them enjoying that kiss, and Yuuki hadn’t fought it.

Mishima: **It doesn’t and I know that**

Mishima: **I know it was stupid too**

Mishima: **When Akira comes back I’ll tell him and we’ll talk about it and if he doesn’t want to date me that’s fine**

Mishima: **But you ask me why after acting like a wall at the mixer**

Mishima: **He was freaking me out and kept doing all this stuff and maybe I wasn’t reading him right or w/e but**

Mishima: **I didn’t tell Ryuji this but there was this guy in middle school**

Mishima: **He was one of the guys that bullied me okay**

Mishima: **He caught me in an empty classroom once and I thought I was a goner**

Mishima: **But he didn’t do anything just got up in my space and stood there**

Mishima: **And I didn’t know what to do about it**

Mishima: **Yamada freaked me out like that so I thought I’d try to scare him off**

Mishima: **Obviously it didn’t work**

Mishima: **:/**

No, obviously it hadn’t. But…

Yusuke: **I fail to see how kissing him would make him scared of you.**

Mishima: **I know it wasn’t the most thought out thing I’ve ever done okay**

Mishima: **It was either that or hit him and you know I’m not a hitting kind of guy**

Mishima: **Still think I’m too scrawny**

Mishima: **But anyway a kiss from somebody you don’t like and who you’ve been taught isn’t somebody you should be kissing**

Mishima: **Maybe I thought that if he thought I was interested like that he’d back off because what straight guy would want a gay guy lusting after him and kissing him in dark public places**

Mishima: **Things like that**

Yusuke didn’t quite see it, but the girls at Kosei had often whined about unwanted advances from boys in their class or boys on the street and he thought of Ishida and how unsettled she’d been. It made him think of how often he had thought of Yuuki becoming unsettled by his own advances; hadn’t that been part of the reason he had kept his silence? Hadn’t he worried Yuuki would distance himself from him, and all because Yusuke had come on too strong or too forcefully?

Mishima: **Tell me you get it I don’t want to have to say it**

Because it meant Yamada could be a victim, of some kind or another, and naturally wouldn’t want that. By all rights if he hadn’t been interested even in the slightest, he would have fought back and won.

Yusuke: **No, I do. It does make some sense now.**

Yusuke: **But why did you keep it to yourself? That he scared you.**

Mishima: **Because**

Mishima: **I guess**

He went quiet for so long Yusuke thought that was it. Just because he wanted to; just because he couldn’t trust any of them with it; just because he knew Ryuji would go in swinging without asking any questions first, fearing another Kamoshida in the making.

Mishima: **You know I’ve only had friends for like a year right?**

Mishima: **And I could never trust my parents with this kind of stuff either**

Mishima: **So I just**

Yusuke: **You thought we wouldn’t support you. That we would** **disregard you worries and tell you nothing was wrong. Is that it?**

Mishima: **I mean yeah**

Mishima: **That’s pretty much all anybody’s ever done**

Mishima: **Also that if we tried to confront him about it he’d just give this ‘I’m worried for you’ speech**

Mishima: **He tried to give me one like four times? Five times?** **But I never bought it**

Mishima: **It just didn’t feel real** **you know?**

Yusuke could relate to that. Those days spent at the rehab center, sitting with Suzui and her friends in the common room, becoming a part of their group when he felt he had nothing anymore, not even art to tie him down… Yusuke had thought of it as one long dream, even after Nakanohara stepped forward to take him in. It had taken so long to stop wondering when he would wake from it all. If someone had tried to pry into his life then, what would he have done?

He didn’t know. He was too tall and too odd to intimidate, if his classmates were to be believed. No one dared to pry, either, believing they would reopen some old wound, though several of his former Kosei classmates that attended his college had taken the time to ask if he was alright and eating well, which seemed to be more than Yuuki was getting.

In fact, it seemed to be far more than what Yuuki was getting.

Yusuke: **I understand that quite well, actually.**

Mishima: **And anyway I’ve never confronted anybody**

Mishima: **I’d probably mess it up**

Mishima: **Yeah I thought you would but you know how it is**

Mishima: **It’s just head shit**

Mishima: **I hate it so much**

Yusuke: **I understand that as well. I won’t seek out any other explanations.**

He could give Yuuki and Akira that much space, at least. There were some things that were better left unsaid, and Yuuki’s apparent propensity to push himself onto strangers was one of them. If Yusuke stepped in now, daring to help…

He might get what he wanted, but not in the way that he wanted it. Yuuki gave out physical affection because it was what he craved the most and that had somehow blended in with his expectation of physical punishment; giving Yusuke love would only increase his anticipation of being rejected by the rest of his friends and Akira, whether it be with a cold shoulder or by being beaten to a bloody pulp.

Yusuke: **But I believe you need help. More help than we can give you.**

Yuuki took another long time to answer. This time it wasn’t quite so hard; Togo was done with her cake and tea and was asking for the check, and Yusuke busied himself with draining his glass of water and collecting his things. He waited for Togo by the entrance when his phone buzzed one last time.

Mishima: **Yeah I know**

And that was all.

It felt very anticlimactic; Yusuke hadn’t known what he was expecting, but it hadn’t been such a deep analysis. Vehement denials, maybe; a declaration that Yuuki could kiss whomever he pleased; tearful—or, as tearful as a text message could be—admissions that he loved Yamada more than Akira.

“Do you feel any better?” Togo asked once they were outside again, smothered by the wet heat.

 _No_ , Yusuke thought. Yuuki had kissed Yamada because there was something deeply wrong with him—it was almost like he’d been searching for a way to take control of the situation, and that was the easiest and most pleasurable way to do it, the same way Yusuke had once tried to sabotage Madarame’s reputation by painting nothing but pieces filled with rage for several months straight. All of them had sold. It hadn’t done a thing.

This was the same, but with a person rather than a painting.

But Yuuki didn’t hate him. Yuuki hated himself, the one who thought these ideas were good in the first place—and he had enough insight to know that.

Yusuke held himself as they walked back to the station, past the bookstore where he’d contemplated throwing most of his savings away to buy an art book.

“I’m worried for him,” he said.

“Good,” Togo said. “That makes four of us.”

“Four?”

“You, me,” Togo counted off her fingers, “this stranger named Alibaba who texted me this morning, and Segawa.”

“Segawa?” That sounded familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to the face.

“From the mixer. You told her about Leblanc; I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

“I’m surprised you’re in contact with her.”

“She asked, and I couldn’t find a way to say no without seeming… frosty,” she said. “No one’s ever asked for my number before while sounding so genuine. Usually it’s men twice my age.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said, picturing the kind of man she meant: the plastic, friendly grin; the snide comments behind her back that a woman shouldn’t be playing shogi professionally; the passive politeness of a man who wasn’t interested in her mind but in her body. Maybe they meant well, but usually they didn’t; Yusuke had had his own share of them in the half-year since starting college, and most of them reminded him too much of Madarame for him to be eager about their patronage.

Togo hummed. “Anyway, Segawa told me she was going to try and clear your friend’s name. She asked for my help, and while I wondered what help I could give, I also wondered if you’d appreciate the intervention. I wouldn’t want to step on your toes, Kitagawa; I also didn’t want to valiantly proclaim his innocence if it wasn’t, well, true.”

“I could have lied to you, you know.”

This time she smiled. “That’s why I waited to mention it. If it was as bad as that Yamamoto girl said, surely you’d tell me—and you did, even though it wasn’t, and maybe I’m just as much of a prude as they call me, but… I can’t stand those kinds of rumors. People like that should be put in their place.”

“They’ll talk regardless, won’t they?”

“That isn’t the point,” she said. “How would you like it if you left with him—if he was truly sick or anxious and needed to leave—and you learned everyone was saying _that_?”

Awful. But it wasn’t his place to go around telling everyone what they could or couldn’t say—just as it wasn’t Ryuji’s right to tell Yusuke what he could or couldn’t say. That didn’t make it any less wrong or infuriating.

People gossiped and believed what they wished. He thought Togo, of all of his friends, would understand that; clearly she didn’t, or she wouldn’t be glaring at him, lips pursed to keep from shouting.

“The harder we fight it,” he said, at last, “the more likely it is to appear to be true.”

Her face softened. “You’re right. I know it, too. But it’s—it’s frustrating, sitting back and being able to do nothing while rumors like that circulate. And sometimes, even if you don’t fight it, it’s all you’re remembered for. Is that really what you want for your friend?”

“Of course it isn’t,” he said. “Who would? But against the masses, we’re…”

“I know,” she sighed. “We’re nothing but grains of sand in the desert: small and inconsequential.”

That wasn’t quite how he would put it, but it fit. Against the shouts of the masses they were nothing but whimpers in the wind, weak and ignored.

“What does she plan on doing?” he asked.

“She didn’t say.”

Yusuke shook his head. It was all well and good to want to fix the situation, but without a plan—without a good plan, and one that could be commenced sooner rather than later—it was nothing but well wishes, like prayers for rain during a drought.

But it was enough to make Togo think for the rest of their walk to the station. Yusuke let her take an open seat and stood, hand through the loop dangling from the ceiling, and hoped that whatever plan Segawa ultimately came up with, it was a good one.

It was only when he was on his way home, walking down the familiar street, that he remembered Togo also mentioned a message from Alibaba.

What in the world was Futaba doing messaging Togo? Was she in on this plan of Segawa’s, or perhaps bored, or was it a different Alibaba?

 _Impossible_ , Yusuke thought. Futaba was _just_ vain enough that she wouldn’t stand for another Alibaba to be running amok and potentially claiming her victories as their own, so it couldn’t be some other Alibaba messaging Togo—which only meant that Futaba was, for some reason, interested in her.

Or in something she had to say.

But, why? Why Togo? Yusuke had made it perfectly clear that he would talk with her whenever she wished, provided that he wasn’t asleep and therefore couldn’t answer, and never mind that Futaba had no idea who Togo was or her relationship with Yusuke—

 **Futaba** , he sent as soon as he stepped through the apartment’s door, **did you, by chance, bug my phone?**

Nakanohara called out from the kitchen, “Yusuke? Are you just getting back?”

“Ah—yes,” he said, nearly tripping into the wall as he pried his shoes off with one hand while staring at his phone. And some people thought they could text and drive—ridiculous.

 **Ugh no why would I do that** , Futaba had sent back almost immediately, followed quickly by, **cant talk Im spreading slander**.

**Does this have something to do with Segawa and the mixer?**

**Yes now shut up** , was her last message before he was unceremoniously blocked. It wouldn’t be permanent, he told himself. It was just Futaba’s way of dealing with too much at once: block out one to give her all to the other.

Yusuke had been that way once. Recently he had begun feeling it return, and the jarring alarms on his phone had kept him from painting through the night more often than he previously thought possible; the fact that he was once again enjoying painting was a miracle in and of itself. He supposed he had his Friday night art classes at the rehab center to thank for that—teaching and encouraging the sick and lonely and downtrodden that they now had the tools to express themselves, and in a way that would last for decades or lifetimes after they were gone or their misery was behind them was a far cry from the competitive life he’d lived under Madarame, where everything had to be fit to hang in a museum or it wasn’t fit to exist at all.

… And Akira, if he was being honest. Akira and Yuuki.

“Yusuke?” Nakanohara asked, now peering around the fridge to stare at him. “Are you coming to eat?”

Not _Are you alright?_ like he’d been asking all week, knowing by now that the answer wasn’t likely to change anytime soon, and it wasn’t as if Yusuke would turn down a meal.

If Nakanohara remained suspicious, by the end of dinner he’d either forgotten or decided to let it be; he made his after-dinner tea and settled down at the table with his sketchbook and an assortment of pencils and barely noticed when Yusuke slipped out to bathe and sequester himself in his room.

For a moment he considered leaving the app alone and joining Nakanohara in the kitchen; Akira hadn’t been well yesterday, and it was likely that he wasn’t well today, either. Yusuke wasn’t about to disrupt his rest just to check on him, but if the posts Sakaki had made earlier in the day were to be believed, then Yusuke had much more preparation to do before he could think of tackling the final obstacle coming between the people of the Soreil and their new planet.

Every second counted, and every second Yusuke spent trying to procrastinate his way out of continuing to help was a second wasted.

He would—he would just have to check and see. Whether Akira was better or not, there were tasks that Yusuke could still fulfill as Delta, and surely one of them would be the key to sending Akira home.

And if not, Akira deserved to know.

He picked a few discarded paint tubes off the floor as the app loaded and dumped them in the trash can by the nightstand, already half-full of other tubes and torn pages from his sketchbooks and a few cans of potato sticks. The guilt he’d felt at eating them in the middle of the night had prompted him to add more cans to the tower than he’d eaten. It still didn’t feel like enough.

He wondered when it would be. When he had a wall full of them? A pantry? A room?

Would he ever be satisfied with what he had?

 _Never_ , he thought as PLASMA headquarters came into view. Renall was there, talking with a pair of guards and their Genomi partners; Casty waved in greeting from behind them, Delta focusing on something in the distance with a scowl, arms crossed and fingers tapping.

 _“Sheesh, you sure took your time today,”_ Casty said; Renall finished her briefing and sent the guards on their way. Delta frowned even deeper.

**How is he?**

_“Better, actually,”_ she said, and from her smile knew it to be true, but there was a glint there, something malicious. She was angry; they all were, he realized.

 _“You can’t trick him into saying it, Cass,”_ Delta said, still scowling at the stairs.

 _“And I never planned to!”_ she defended, smile turning sickly-sweet.

She was only a set of pixels on his screen, even if she was flesh-and-blood in the other dimension, and he had nothing to fear—but fear still trickled down his spine. Her tone, or the look in her eye, or some combination of the two working together to make him remember Madarame’s kinder threats, the ones that started out _Yusuke, I know this is hard for you…_

 _“So, when were you going to tell us about_ _Io—uh,_ _Akira and his boyfriend?”_ she asked.

 _“Cass,”_ Delta sighed, _“we’ve been over this.”_

_“Not with Earthes we haven’t! Spill it!”_

**It was never my place to tell.**

_“We’ve been calling him by a name he can’t stand for months, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”_

**He told you?**

_“Yeah,”_ Delta said, and Renall stared daggers into Yusuke’s screen. _“_ _Now everyone’s wondering if you were helping him hide it, because if he hadn’t, we would probably have the Heart of the Planet finished by now,_ _even though I keep telling them that it wasn’t anyone’s decision to make except I—Akira’s!_ _A man has his pride, you know!”_

Yusuke wasn’t sure what good that pride was—but he could never have taken that moment away from Akira. Never.

 _“_ _Forgive us,”_ Renall said, shutting down whatever argument Casty was about to start. _“We’re his friends—his_ _C_ _ouncil—and yet he couldn’t trust us with this until now. It only proves how selfishly we’ve been behaving,_ _and how untrustworthy he considered us.”_

He couldn’t say anything to reassure her; she was right, and all four of them knew that.

 _“He’s recovering well,”_ she went on. _“He managed to eat today, and went for a walk earlier. Aside from the fatigue of fighting off his illness, he’s perfectly fine.”_

That was good to hear. If Akira were still sick and grappling with himself, Yusuke wouldn’t be able to give him the news. Yusuke wasn’t aware of how well Yuuki was taking it, if he knew of it at all, and Akira—would he become resigned to his fate, or determined to change it? With all of the differences between the world Yusuke was visiting and Sakaki’s, could they say that fate was fixed?

Was it possible that Yusuke could perform the miracle Sakaki’s Goro had mentioned?

_“Naturally, I’d like to wait until he’s fully recovered to finish the Heart of the Planet. A few more days and he’ll be strong enough, I think. That gives us some extra time to prepare the people of the Soreil for departure to the new planet.”_

_“You make it sound like it’s set in stone,”_ Casty commented.

 _“We have to believe,”_ Renall said, _“or let doubt ruin all of the work and hardship we all have gone through. Not just Akira and His Majesty, but even the common people, and the Sharl. We all must come together and give our prayers for the new planet.”_

 _“You sound like Kanon, now,”_ Delta muttered, glaring some more.

_“It’s the truth.”_

Delta sighed, then, and asked, _“And in the meantime we’re, what, supposed to sit on our hands?”_

_“Rest is important.”_

This time Casty crossed her arms. _“I might go insane if I have to keep sitting around! Isn’t there anything we can do? Patrols, or, uh—something.”_

_“With Delta as he is, no.”_

_“That’s not true,”_ Delta said. _“This guy could help us do something. Right?”_

**We could find a miracle.**

_“A miracle? We already have one, don’t we?”_ he asked.

Yusuke paused, then. In all of Futaba’s science fiction movies, knowledge of the future was meant to be kept secret, as divulging it could cause drastic changes—up to and including erasing the future one had come from.

But Yusuke was from a different dimension; surely the laws didn’t apply? Surely he could say that this man would lose the daughter he loved so dearly, even if her sacrifice meant gaining a new planet, a new home.

Surely he could—

 _“It’s Prim, isn’t it,”_ Delta said, squeezing his arms.

 _“Prim?”_ Casty asked.

_“She’s been under the control of Interdimend for longer than I have. There’s no telling what’ll happen to her if she loses that control; it could be the only thing keeping her going,_ _keeping her alive. Worst case scenario—”_

_“No,”_ Casty said. _“Not happening.”_

_“We don’t know that.”_

_“He’s right,”_ Renall said, cutting off the argument again. _“Interdimend is a power none of us can hope to understand, the repercussions of which will be felt for years to come. Delta is already far too close to dependency on it to live a normal life. It’s possible—”_

 _“No!”_ Casty said once more, plugging her ears and squeezing her eyes shut. _“I don’t want to lose anyone else! Not Prim, not Delta, not anybody!”_

Delta groped his way forward, tugging her close as his hands felt resistance; she grasped him and buried her face in his chest as he managed to maneuver a hand to run through her hair. He spoke, soft and soothing in her ear: _“We’re not going to lose anyone. We’re going to find this miracle we need. Earthes will help; that’s why he brought it up, right?”_

**Yes.**

Because the Prim Sakaki had fought was dead, and that meant, somehow, that Akira and Goro had no way to return to Earth; Yusuke could only guess that there was some knowledge only she possessed that would bring them home. Was it a byproduct of Interdimend’s control, or some morsel that Zill fed her, or some combination of the two?

The only way to know was to save her; the only way to save her was to find a miracle.

 _“We’ll search the Soreil’s documents,”_ Renall stated, tapping her cane on the floor and summoning any nearby PLASMA troops that weren’t otherwise occupied. _“It’s possible there may be some record of it that has yet to be uncovered; perhaps you two could ask the Aru tribe on Ar Ciel for their assistance? They may have come across it and not realized its potential.”_

 _“But,”_ Casty said, _“Delta can’t—”_

_“Akira will be indisposed for the time being, won’t he?_ _He’ll have_ _no need for a guardian in town.”_

_“_ _That’s right, but…”_

**I’d like to talk to him first.**

_“Is that so?”_

_“Go on ahead,”_ Delta told him, shrugging around Casty’s quaking shoulders. _“We might be a while ourselves. Shirotaka and Ren took him to the bathhouse; they might still be there.”_

So Yusuke went, following the familiar streets down to the bathhouse where he and Akira and dozens of other PLASMA Genomi pairs performed their Purification Ceremonies. It was cordoned off from the rest of the bathing areas, and there was usually a line to get in; today was no different, although the receptionist seemed shocked that the robot was without his usual partner and wanted to head into the men’s bath.

 _“He’s with Mr. Ionasal all the time, isn’t he?”_ one of the troops waiting their turn asked.

 _“We thought it was weird Mr. Ionasal was ‘ere without ya, big guy,”_ another said. He grinned, showing a mouthful of teeth capped in metal; one of the front ones that wasn’t was chipped, and his tongue worked at the slight gap.

Delta had said that fighting was much, much harder without Interdimend’s help, once, and the proof was sitting right in front of him: men with their lumpy broken noses and lost teeth and their hands beginning to gnarl like a tree branches’ from one too many fist fights out of dangerous situations; women with their bruised knees and shins and forearms as they Sang through their vanguard’s failures. One woman had lost half a hand, and her three remaining fingers carded listlessly through her partner’s hair as her head rested on her lap.

The chipped-tooth man waved him on to the men’s bath, telling the receptionist, _“Big guy’s not gonna soak in the water, don’cha worry ‘bout that. ‘E’s prolly just worried ‘bout ‘is partner, right, big guy? I ‘eard ‘e was sick. Nasty timing, ‘uh?”_

 **Yes** , Yusuke agreed, watching the guard jump in surprise at the telepathy, then grin even wider.

 _“Is it true, then?”_ one of the women asked. _“Is it almost over?”_

**Yes.**

_“Oh,”_ she said, with a look that said she didn’t quite believe it. Yusuke had worn that look once, sitting in a hospital bed that he couldn’t find the strength to leave, watching the news as it told him Madarame was arrested, he was going on trial, everything Yusuke had ever done to make him happy was a waste, was another page of crimes against him, was another testament to his villainy.

Yusuke had cried, then, silent and slow, the same way this woman was now. She turned to hide her tears on her partner’s shoulder; he took them and held her close.

Yusuke ignored the way his heart skipped a beat at the sight. Delta and Casty were one thing—how close they were and how much they meant to each other was apparent from the very beginning—but these total strangers, with names and lives Yusuke would never be privy to, was another. Akira’s friends had been fighting to help him; these people had been fighting for the simple pleasure of never having to fight again, of living the rest of their lives in peace and comfort in a home they could call their own, of never having to worry that their friends and families would be the ones to disappear next.

(Yusuke knew they would spread the word. It was too good not to: all those years of strife were almost behind them; all those years spent waiting and hoping were almost done.)

And Yusuke envied them their simple comforts, their gestures of love. He couldn’t give them himself, not to the one he wanted. He wasn’t worthy.

Only Akira was. Akira was the only one Yuuki wanted.

He sidestepped into the men’s bath, thanking whatever god would listen that he didn’t have to maneuver the robot through a low doorway—everything on the Soreil was built to be about twice as large as it needed to be, for reasons Yusuke could guess at but couldn’t confirm—and took in the changing room, Shirotaka sitting on a bench nearby, clothed and with a towel hanging around his neck.

He looked up from his tron and barely blinked at the robot. _“They’re still in there,”_ he said, pointing a thumb at the other door.

Yusuke headed in. The steam was weak, though Ren was over by the faucet, filling the bath with more hot water; Akira shivered slightly in his place by the edge, the ripples in the water the only thing giving him away. He cracked an eye open as the robot neared and huffed a laugh.

**If you’re cold, you should get dressed.**

_“This is the warmest I’ve felt in two or three days,”_ Akira said, _“so let me have it. Just for a little longer, please?”_

 _“Is that the robot?”_ Ren called, turning around and shutting the faucet. He waded over—even standing, the water came up to his waist—and his hair cascaded down over his shoulders. He pulled a comb out from the tangles and said, _“Great! You hold him down while I brush his hair.”_

_“That’s not a brush.”_

_“Comb, brush, does it matter? Point is, your hair’s a mess.”_

_“I like it this way,”_ Akira said, and Yusuke might have sworn he was pouting.

_“Which is why Earthes here is gonna hold you down! Trust me, you don’t want Renall to be the one doing it before you speak to the people, okay?”_

Turning to Yusuke and brandishing his comb like a sword, he said, _“If we get the people pumped up to help Akira here Sing, it’ll be worth it, right? So Renall’s been digging around for all the old Emperor Regalia, the stuff that’s not the Divine Raiment. Because Akira. Is going. To Sing. The Song.”_

 _“I hate speeches,”_ Akira said, dodging Ren’s attempts to attack his hair and stumbling in the water. He was… not wearing trunks, and the scars did, in fact, extend beyond the waistband.

Yusuke didn’t dare to get a better look before Akira sat back down, holding off Ren with his arms.

 _“Why can’t you do it?”_ he asked, adding a foot into the equation. _“You’re the Emperor; they’ll listen to you!”_

 _“Were you not listening? Kanon and I will be doing the bulk of it; all you’ve got to do is show up, say a few lines at the end, and look awe-inspiring!”_ Ren gestured vaguely with the comb at Akira’s head and added, _“And a bird’s nest is_ not _awe-inspiring!”_

 _“Wh—”_ Akira started to say, but was cut off as Ren finally managed to push him under the water; he came back up, sputtering and spitting and wiping his eyes, and Ren pounced.

The least Yusuke could do was keep them from hurting themselves in a bath, of all places. He pulled Ren back by lifting him straight out of the water, leaving Akira to stare wide-eyed at the comb dangling from his bangs, mouth working like a fish’s.

 **The bath is no place for this** , Yusuke picked.

No place was the place for this, but Yusuke had grown up in a household that valued image over truth; there could be no talk of Madarame treating his students like trash to be discarded on the side of the road if they were well-groomed and moderately well-fed. He had always taken to Madarame’s hair-brushing—

—like a _dog_ , eagerly anticipating the kind, gentle touches of his master. The head pats, the way Madarame had combed his fingers through Yusuke’s hair, scratching at the scalp to soothe the pain when the brush caught on a stubborn tangle. That was before he was expected to know how to do it himself, before he was expected to contribute or be deemed worthless, before he was tall enough to see himself in the bathroom mirror without a step stool.

 _“Huh?”_ Ren muttered as Yusuke let him down on the tile. He looked up at the robot, at Yusuke through the screen, and stared for a moment.

Before Yusuke could wonder what he was thinking, he grabbed up a towel and left. Akira tugged the comb out of his hair and stared at it like it was the match that set his house alight.

 _“Thanks,”_ he said, and started working at his hair. _“Uh, I guess you know I told them?”_

**I do. It must have been hard.**

_“It was, yeah,”_ he mumbled, grimacing as the comb worked through a tangle. _“But I felt way better after. They’re—they’re all here for me. Ren even said he’d like to meet Yuuki, if it were possible, and the rest of them all jumped on the idea. I’ve—I’ve got good friends, huh.”_

**You do.**

He laughed. _“Although it was kind of hard to tell whether it was to judge him or not. I hope not; I’d like Yuuki to meet them. He only got to see how they were before. He never got to talk to them.”_

**You think they want to judge him?**

_“You know, to see if he’s a good match for me. Friend stuff.”_ He sniffed. _“But I can’t be sure. I only saw it a couple times myself back home, and… no one would have done that for me back then.”_

**No one?**

_“No one,”_ he confirmed. His hand and the comb worked through the last of that particular tangle and fell to the water with a splash; Akira shivered as the spray hit his face. _“I didn’t have friends.”_

**Not one?**

_“Nope, not a one,”_ he confirmed again. _“I got into too much trouble trying to help people. All the other kids stayed away so they wouldn’t get in trouble, too. I learned to like talking to the tourists we’d get instead, and they thought I was even more trouble for doing that. I couldn’t have won even if I tried.”_

He glared at the water, tugging at his bangs, remembering. _“_ _But I’ve got them, now,”_ he said at length, _“my friends. Friends who want me around and don’t think I’m strange for wanting to help my own kidnappers. Friends who want me to be happy even if it means being separated for the rest of our lives.”_

**They’re kind.**

_“More than just kind. They understand, too. When I told them I wanted to be called Akira from now on they barely fussed about it.”_

He paused and tugged the comb out of his hair to stare at it. He had to know that the bath was the worst place to comb his hair, and yet he went right back to it. Yusuke shuddered to think of how much hair the attendants were going to find later.

 _“I don’t know what I did to deserve them,”_ he said. _“Or what I did to deserve you, and Yuuki, and—”_

He sniffed and shivered, stuck the comb in his hair and climbed out, wrapping up in the only leftover towel.

 _“What should I do if, after all of this, I still can’t go home? I want to so badly it’s all I think about—going back to Earth and—and to nothing except Yuuki. Would my parents want me back if I showed up? Would they_ really _want me back, after all the trouble I’_ _ve_ _caused?”_

They would. Yusuke had seen their grief first-hand, had heard Akira’s mother cry out for her son—had also heard them say that, yes, they had kicked their only child out of the only safe haven he had. They were human and prone to fits of anger, the same as the rest of them, which meant they were also prone to the guilt after. They had come charging into Leblanc just for the chance to see Akira one more time, after all. They had come looking for a way to apologize.

It was more than Yusuke would ever receive.

 **You’re more loved than you realize** , he picked. **You have more friends than you realize. There are dozens of people on your side, and not all of them live upon this ship.**

For a second, Akira looked as if he doubted it. Yusuke didn’t fault him that; spending most of his life unwanted and struggling to find a place to belong meant that the ease with which he found one would be astonishing. Yusuke certainly thought so.

(He owed so much to Suzui. Perhaps—perhaps he should paint her something, as a token of his gratitude.)

But soon that doubt cleared. _“I know,”_ he said, softly, voice wobbling. _“I know—but it’s hard to believe sometimes, and then the thoughts creep back in, and the next thing I know—”_

Akira stopped speaking as his voice cracked. Yusuke waited as he breathed and rocked back and forth on his feet and ran the comb through his hair. It kept snagging on the tangles, and Yusuke was willing to bet that it was so Akira would have an excuse for the tears that slipped down his cheeks.

(He wondered who started the nonsense that men didn’t cry. Men were human. Humans felt.

The robot he’d tried convincing himself he was back when he still lived with Madarame—that didn’t.)

Head shit, Yuuki had called it. Those damn recurring thoughts that popped up from time to time and refused to leave for days, the ones that whispered worthlessness and loneliness and hopelessness into a place far deeper than his ears. How they echoed, over and over, like a broken record.

 _“But you know that already, don’t you?”_ Akira asked. _“_ _And—and I know I have to be strong to finish this, but—”_

**You want to go home.**

_“We’re so close,”_ he said, wiping at his face with the towel. _“We’re—we’re so close, but I don’t feel any closer to going home than I did at the beginning. There has to be a way, right? There just—there has to be.”_

 **Like a miracle** , Yusuke picked, and filled him in on Sakaki’s failure. How Ra Ciela had been reborn, but at the cost of Prim’s life; how Goro and Akira and their friends had scoured the Soreil’s documents for any note on reversing the soul-summoning and finding nothing. How they had no choice but to stay.

How they had both broken down in the middle of the Song of Acceptance, mourning the lives they could no longer return to and the people they were leaving behind.

Akira muttered, _“A miracle, huh,”_ and smiled, the slightest quirk of his lips that lived on in his eyes. _“We already have one of those.”_

**Sakaki had the Heart, too.**

_“Not that,”_ he said. _“Us. We have us. We have Yuuki. Isn’t that a miracle all on its own, the two of us finding each other out of all the other people on Earth? The two of us who love Yuuki?”_

**How will that help?**

_“I don’t know,”_ was the admittance. _“I don’t know. It’s not strength, not the kind we’ll need to face her. It’s not even the kind we’ll need to create the planet. Does she—does she really have to die? Is the control over her that strong?”_

It had been strong enough that fighting it took serious effort on her part, and yet that had barely been enough; it had torn her apart to regain control, and it had torn her parents apart to be forced to fight her. It had torn Akira apart to fight her.

 _“She’s innocent,”_ Akira said. _“She hasn’t done anything to deserve dying—but she will? She_ has _to? That’s not—that’s not_ right _.”_

It wasn’t, but she had died smiling, happy with her contribution. Happy that her parents were alive and the planet was formed and that it was all going to be worth it. Happy that her parents had held her close as she took her last breaths and dissolved into the same nothingness she had sprung from.

Happy, despite the grief. Happy, despite being used for the last two years for a plan that would ultimately fail. Happy to thwart it.

And Yuuki—

 _“Yuuki wouldn’t want me to go home on a sacrifice like that,”_ Akira said. His voice was like steel, all traces of his tears gone. _“_ I _wouldn’t want to go home on a sacrifice like that. I told myself I wouldn’t, that if it cost lives I would rather s-stay than go._ _I’d never. I’d_ never _.”_

**That’s why we’re looking for a miracle.**

_“And you won’t rest until you’ve found one, no matter how unlikely it is to work?”_

**Yes.** Even if it took months, or years; even if they had to scour Ar Ciel for the smallest trace of one. Even if Yuuki gradually gave up on Akira and moved on to someone who could love him the way he wanted.

_“_ _You’re really determined to see me and Goro come home, aren’t you?”_

**Yes.**

_“Because of Yuuki?”_

**No** , he picked, thinking of the Amamiyas and Ms. Akechi and a town full of people who had mustered up the nation and found hundreds of missing kids in the years since Akira’s disappearance. **Not just because of Yuuki.**

And all Akira could say, after another long while spent thinking on it was, _“I see.”_

**Are you disappointed?**

_“I’m not. I’m—not sure, actually.”_ He tapped his temple with the comb. _“_ _I’m not even sure I wouldn’t accept a sacrifice or two after a while, if it meant getting home. But—but you’re here to help. You’ll stay until you think you’ve done all you can. That’s not just because you love Yuuki… Do you—is it possible—do you care about what happens to me and Goro that much?”_

The complicated answer was that, no, he didn’t. Not at first, anyway; as long as they came home Yusuke had been willing to do anything to make it happen, as long he succeeded. That had changed over the course of events as they unfolded before him: how Goro was letting himself be used by a maniacal woman bent on becoming a god; how Akira was fighting to make everyone, not just himself, happy. How they had fought with each other; how Akira had screamed and held the robot’s broken head after Prim’s satellite attack; the faith Goro held in the one person who had treated him like a human being. How this was no longer about just getting through it all and accomplishing a goal; Yusuke would accept nothing less than perfection. He wouldn’t tolerate an ending where Prim still died, Goro and Akira had no way to return, and Yuuki was left heartbroken.

The shorter, truer answer: **Not just you. Everyone.**

 _“Everyone,”_ Akira repeated, softly. This time he did smile, and Yusuke was afraid to say that he looked better that way. Certainly more handsome, even if half his hair was a scraggly mess, and Akira chuckled. _“I see I’ve managed to find myself a good guardian—no, the best one._ _After this I won’t expect anything_ _less than_ _everything you’ve got, understand?”_

**Yes.**

_“Good,”_ he said, padding over to the changing room. He was halfway to the door when he stopped and asked, _“Does Yuuki know? About the failure?”_

It was likely. It also wasn’t likely; Yuuki didn’t enjoy checking his site any more than he had to to avoid the constant questions of his identity and how the app worked.

 **I don’t know** , Yusuke picked.

Akira hummed, and thought, and eventually said, _“Well, even if he doesn’t… be there for him for me. Please. If you can, that is.”_

**If I can?**

_“If you can make yourself do it. If he lets you. Even if he has someone helping him along now, they won’t be there forever. I don’t—I don’t want him to—If he thinks I’ve got no way to return, if he thinks I’m not coming back to him, please, just. Just be there for him.”_

**He wouldn’t do something like that** , said the first option, and Yusuke almost laughed at the sight of it. Wishful thinking would only get them so far, and both he and Akira knew what kind of person Yuuki was deep down: eager to take the easiest way out to make his pain and sadness disappear. Whether that involved standing on the rooftops of tall buildings or being held in the arms of strangers would be Yuuki’s decision.

Akira didn’t want that kind of future to come to pass. Neither did Yusuke.

 **I will** , he picked instead.

 _“_ _Good,”_ he said, and forced out a laugh. _“Now, I better go and make sure Ren hasn’t stolen my clothes._ _Go and find that miracle.”_

 **I will** , he picked again, and that was that.


	23. The Last Day

“Don’t you have class today?” Ann asked.

Ryuji grumbled something that tried to be an answer and failed; her kitchen was too bright with the blinds in the living room pulled up, but whatever she was making smelled _amazing_.

He squinted at the ingredients scattered across the counter: eggs, an empty bag of shredded potatoes it looked like Ann had done by hand, chopped spinach, diced white mushrooms.

“‘Nother American thing?” he asked, padding over to the stove. He let his head rest on her shoulder and watched her cook for a minute or two.

“It’s just an omelet. Nothing fancy.”

“Smells good, though.”

But not as good as Ann did, with her fancy citrus shampoo and half-dozen grapefruit-scented facial something-or-others, and he only became aware that his face was practically buried in her neck when she tapped him right on the nose.

She wasn’t tense. She was even laughing as he groaned and blinked the sudden pain away, going back to her omelet with a smile on her face.

Ryuji did that. Him, and not anybody else.

He set the table, pulled the pitcher of juice out of the fridge. He made the toast when she asked him to and resisted the urge to go back to holding her as she plated the food and spruced it all up with salads.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked, once the food was on the table and they’d started eating. It tasted as good as it smelled, too, though Ryuji couldn’t help the dash of ketchup he added to his.

Eggs just tasted weird without it.

“Yeah,” he said. “He was feeling better. Helps that ‘taba’s started looking into things for him.”

She scrunched up her nose at the mention of Futaba. “Are we sure that what she’s doing is legal?”

“Hell no it isn’t,” he said. “But you know ‘taba—it’s giving her something to do since her friend left. She said something about wanting a challenge, too, so I thought, why the hell not.”

“But are _you_ okay?” she asked again.

He grunted and ate half a slice of toast as Ann waited, patient as a goddamn mountain. She hadn’t questioned him showing up at her place at one in the morning, just let him in and loaned him blankets for the couch. He couldn’t remember what he’d told her last night; the only thing he could recall was Yuuki, reading and rereading that goddamn post on his forum, his face utterly blank.

Ryuji would take all the ugly-crying in the world before he’d take that blank, defeated look from Yuuki again. Ryuji would take crying and screaming and throwing a tantrum before that again. Ryuji had only managed to leave because Yuuki seemed to be too blank and empty to move, and hoped that the waterworks had started up after he left.

And here was Ann, worried for _him_ when all he’d managed to think about last night was Futaba and Yuuki.

He sighed, scrubbing at his face with a hand. “Nah,” he finally said. “I don’t want to think that this could be the end of it. Futaba sure as hell doesn’t; that’s what got her started on her project. ‘N Yuuki… I dunno. I don’t know what to do for him. If I show up today, too, you think he’ll be mad at me?”

“Maybe,” Ann said.

“We know I can’t be there all the time,” he said, “but I think he’s gonna take that the wrong way, too. Like, he can’t bother me so much even when I told him he could ‘cause he thinks he’s, I dunno, taking advantage of my friendship or whatever. Or that he’s bugging me ‘cause I’ve got my own shit to do. He’s—he’s not. I’d rather him bug me than find out he—”

“Yeah,” Ann said, reading his face or the silence after he broke off. “I know.”

“If we knew this was the end, that’d be one thing,” Ryuji said, “but we don’t. Yuuki’s trying to hang in there, but it’s like he’s making himself think it can’t be the end. I don’t want to see him like this. Like he’s, I dunno, desperate.”

“He probably is,” she said. “I mean, if Akira’s stuck there, doesn’t that mean they aren’t dating anymore? Which means all that stuff from last week was just a waste for him to worry over. He made it mean something, and now that it might not, he doesn’t know what to do.”

If that was it, Ryuji really had no idea how he was going to help Yuuki through all of this. It was hard enough convincing the guy that Ryuji honestly wanted to be there for him; convincing him when he thought he was the stupidest shmuck on the planet was going to be ten times harder.

But if it was like last night, where all Ryuji had to do was be there…

No. Sitting around not talking about it was the reason half that shit from last year happened. Ryuji had thought he’d made it perfectly clear that that wasn’t how he wanted their friendship to be, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he needed to say it again. Maybe Yuuki had convinced himself it wasn’t true.

If he had, Ryuji was going to have to remind him.

“Just wish he’d talk to me about it,” Ryuji said. “Instead of sitting around doing nothing, we could be working through this.”

“Yeah, sitting around’s not your thing.”

He rolled his eyes; Ann laughed at him, and her foot smacked his under the table. Her toes were like ice.

She said, “But you’ve been doing it anyway. Sitting around, listening, taking breaks from that busy schedule of yours to spend time with us. He’ll talk to you when he’s ready to, Ryuji.”

“Yeah, I know.”

It felt so wasteful to just… wait, though. Wait until Yuuki was ready to talk; wait until Futaba was done her project; wait until Yusuke wasn’t synonymous with gigantic asshole; wait until Akira was home.

(As if everything would magically get better when Akira was home.)

The faster Ryuji knew what the problem was, the faster he—or they—could tackle it, and the faster everybody would feel better. Less melancholic and prone to sitting around in their rooms; more happy and willing to do stupid shit again, like taking long runs at the park or window shopping at the mall since all of them were broke.

“Seriously, you’re doing fine,” Ann persisted.

“Yeah,” he said, and ate a last forkful of omelet.

Maybe he didn’t seem to believe it, because she added, “And I love you for it.”

“You—huh?”

She grinned with spinach caught in her teeth. The light from the window behind him reached all the way to the tiny table, setting half of her alight in gold, and while she wasn’t as ethereal as before, Ryuji wouldn’t give her up for the world. “I know you heard me,” she teased.

“Say it again anyway? Please?” he asked.

Her grin faded as she blushed, then came back again, brighter than ever. “I love you.”

He was sure he could live off of that simple sentence for days. Ann loved him. Ann loved him, and she’d always said so, but it felt real, now, as if every other time she’d said it was a warm up, or as if his dumbass head finally decided to believe it.

Head shit, Yuuki liked to call it. Yeah, it was shit alright.

“Love you too,” he said, and forgot all of it—everything, up to and including Yamada—for those few moments.

Fuck, life was good.

* * *

Over the years, there had been a great many things Yuuki had come to loathe: volleyball of any kind; the term private lessons;the stares of strangers; confronting said strangers…

Well, it wasn’t him doing the confronting. The moment Yamada was yanked off after class, all Yuuki had to do was follow along behind, unseen, and get a video of… whatever was going to happen. Futaba was certain that his phone’s mic wouldn’t be able to pick up the conversation and had splurged on a lapel mic Yamada was supposed to be wearing—and Yuuki hoped he was, because the farther they got from the more populated parts of campus, the more his stomach twisted into knots.

How suspicious would it be, if Yuuki was found recording everything on a part of campus no one had any business being in?

Pretty damn suspicious, his head told him, and offered up two solutions: run and leave Yamada to his fate, or be brave and do this because it was the right thing to do. People like Yamamoto had to learn they couldn’t go around blackmailing everybody to get what they wanted, and this was the only way for them to learn.

It was—it was the only way. She’d never admit to the blackmail herself, and Yamada had no record of it, and Yamamoto’s reputation was taking longer to decline than Futaba liked, because apparently Yamamoto was popular enough that delusions of traveling to another world to become a heroine didn’t suit her.

Yuuki almost felt sorry for her. Almost, but not quite.

So when Yamada was forced up an empty stairwell, Yuuki followed; when they stopped at the top, Yuuki dragged his phone out and crept up behind them as quietly as he could, earbuds shoved in his ear so he could pretend he was only sitting in an empty stairwell to anyone passing by from below.

As if any music he could be listening to was so loud it would drown out Yamamoto, but it was all he could think of. He’d had tons of classmates use that excuse back in middle school; why wouldn’t it work now, too?

He couldn’t quite see, but if he angled his phone in just the right way—

“—since your phone doesn’t seem to be working, Yamada,” Yamamoto spit.

“I told you, I’m done,” Yamada said.

“Done?” she laughed. “You aren’t done until I say you’re done, understand? Unless you want everyone to know about how you jumped from—”

“Shut up,” he said.

“—guy to guy back in school, you won’t tell me to shut up again. Got it?”

“No,” Yamada said, and Yuuki imagined him shaking his head. “We’re done. I’m done. I’m not going to be a part of your scheme anymore.”

“You don’t decide when you’re done, _I_ do,” she said. “And you’re not done.”

“Yes, I am,” he said. “Unless you think I’m somehow more pathetic than a girl who’s got a crush on some video game character—”

“Shut the fuck up, Yamada—”

“—who can’t even like her back—is that what this is about? You want to bully and blackmail that Yuuki guy into making a _game character_ like you? Are you that desperate?”

A sharp clack as Yamamoto stepped toward him in her heels; the hiss of her voice was barely audible even to Yuuki, splayed out on the next landing. “You have _no_ idea what we’re trying to do, Yamada.”

“Then maybe you should explain it, Yamamoto,” he bit back.

“If you did half the goddamn research I told you to, I wouldn’t have to,” she said, and Yuuki imagined the toss of her hair at the end. “It’s been obvious since the beginning that this Yuuki—whoever he is—is complicit in kidnapping. He’s a criminal, and we’re going to be the ones to catch him.”

“Catch him? You can’t even track him down,” Yamada countered. “You’ve been stalking innocent people just because you _think_ they’re criminals—you don’t even know if this Yuuki you’re looking for is a guy, anyway. And what the hell gives you the right to start acting like a hero now? You think people will like you for this?”

“Oh, please,” she said, with another hair toss, Yuuki was sure. “They already like me. I’m doing this to help you, Yamada; just imagine being part of the group that catches Japan’s most wanted kidnapper! You’ll still be a gaijin, but at least you’ll be worth something.”

“Stop lying to me. If you cared so much, you should have done something sooner—and maybe something that’s not illegal, because I know you’re just going to throw me under the bus for it all. That’s why I’m done. There’s nothing in it for me except making your goddamn fat ass happy, and I don’t give a shit about that anymore.”

“You don’t have a choice, Yamada—”

“I _do_ have a choice! I have a choice to side with the bitch that’s been making my life hell for the past four years and get thrown in jail, or to stay the fuck out of it and listen to you slander me! You can tell them I slept with the whole school for all I care; in the end you’re going to be the petty one who whined when she didn’t get what she wanted!”

Another sharp sound; Yuuki winced in sympathy as Yamada grunted in pain. Neither one of them had thought to bring a first-aid kit, sure that Yamamoto wouldn’t want evidence of their talk going awry. A slap, though—that could be explained in dozens of ways, and none of them good for Yamada.

He didn’t care, laughing at the look on her face, whether it was indignant or angry or upset. “You’re one messed up bitch if you think these tactics will get you through life. I’m through. Bother me again and I’ll go to the police and the dean about this.”

“You’d implicate yourself doing that,” she said.

“Yeah, but I’d take you down with me,” he said. “That’d be a win in my book. The only ones keeping your little group together are you and Sakaki, and he’s already on police watch lists. If I tie your hands up, too, none of you can bother anyone about this again. I’d say that’s worth it.”

“I’m trying to help you!”

“You’re trying to help yourself! Stop it with the fucking excuses already!”

She hit him again. Yuuki wondered what the point of it was—if she was trying to make a statement just one slap would have worked, but two? Did she think that hitting Yamada would make him rethink backing out of their ‘deal?’

As if.

“How pathetic are you,” Yamada asked, “that you have to hit me to get me to stop? Is that how badly you want to keep some loser gaijin around? You could have talked to him yourself; you didn’t have to involve me in it, but I’m just your scapegoat. Just like old times. But I’m done.”

From the sharp hiss Yamamoto let out, she wasn’t happy. Yuuki could picture her clenched jaw and narrowed eyes as easily as if he was staring her down himself, but her tone was anything but. She sounded oddly unfazed, in fact. Kamoshida had sounded the same right before calling some random teammate into his office for private lessons.

Yuuki had hated those private lessons.

“Fine,” she said. “So you’re dropping out. That’s fine. We’ll find out what we want to sooner or later, with or without your help. Tell your little boyfriend that he can’t hide forever.”

“Is that a threat, Yamamoto?”

She didn’t answer. Yuuki scurried down the steps as her heels clicked close to the stairs and hid in an empty classroom until she was safely out of sight, reemerging only when Yamada came down, steps sluggish. He collapsed on the landing; his face was red and tears dripped down his cheeks.

“I did it,” he said when Yuuki came close, the door far, far below them slamming open, then shut.

“Yeah, you did.” He almost wanted to check the video, see how decent it was, or if the angle was off and they wouldn’t be able to use it as blackmail. “Are you, uh, okay?”

Yamada wiped at his face, sniffling as his nose ran. It was relief and exhilaration that made him laugh. “Never thought I’d get to stand up to one of them, that’s all. It’s weird; I used to think they knew everything, but it turns out they don’t and I don’t give a damn what they do anymore. I’ve got friends here who’ll believe me before some dumb rumors anyway.”

“And you’ve got the great Alibaba, too,” Yuuki added, sending the video over to Futaba. If she really cared about the quality she would have bought Yamada a camcorder, and it was up to her whether to use it or not, in the end.

Yamada elbowed him, still laughing. “And I’ve got you, too.”

“No, I—I didn’t do much.”

“Sure you did,” he said. “You believed me, too, didn’t you? You didn’t have to do that. It’s—it’s more than I’ve ever gotten, that belief. I could have lied, you know. Yamamoto could be coming back up those stairs in her bare feet.”

She could have been, sure, but she was probably busy starting the first of many rumors. Segawa was supposed to be on the lookout for those—presumably so they could all laugh at how ridiculous they were—and Yuuki hoped she wouldn’t do anything to come under fire herself.

Two out of the three of them was bad enough.

“If I didn’t believe you, I’d be a hypocrite,” Yuuki said, and figured that his life was awful enough without the app involved that he could mention part of it. “When I was in high school, our gym teacher was this abusive piece of shit. But he had all this power in the school, and everything he did got glossed over because he got results. We went to nationals for years because of this guy; nobody—nobody would have believed us if we told them what he was doing. The principal told us we were blowing it all out of proportion. My mom thought I was on drugs. If more people believed that something bad was going on, then maybe—maybe it would have been better. That’s all.”

If one person believed them—if one person had dared to look past the bruises and the shaky smiles and the tiredness and Ryuji’s broken leg—they would have seen it for what it was, Yuuki thought. Back then he used to wish someone would come to his rescue—all he’d gotten was a series of accusations and Akira, clueless to his plight.

“Shit,” Yamada muttered.

Yuuki laughed, though it was weak and dry. “Somebody strong-arming you into talking to me was way more believable than, um, you actually wanting to, too.”

Yamada blinked. “But you have friends. They must want to talk to you.”

 _Like they did when you met_ , he didn’t say, and there was no way Yuuki was about to describe the painful year he’d spent sitting in a rehab center learning how to ignore everyone again. How hard it was when they asked him his opinion; how Akira had made him want more than what he had.

“We just got along griping about school,” Yuuki settled for.

Yamada didn’t press. He had his secrets, too, and he was smart enough to realize that if he pushed, so could Yuuki, and that it was a can of worms neither or them wanted to open.

Friendship. Loneliness. They were two peas in a pod in that regard.

“She called you my boyfriend,” Yamada said instead, softly, like he didn’t believe the words had actually come out of her mouth.

“She’s called us worse things than boyfriends,” Yuuki reminded him.

“I thought I’d mind it more,” he said. “Being called some other guy’s boyfriend, I mean, but… It feels less weird than being some girl’s boyfriend, especially after we, uh…”

“Kissed,” Yuuki supplied. “Why are you so nervous to say it?”

“Because it felt like a real kiss. Because it was my first one. Because I’m not used to talking about kisses with guys. Take your pick.”

Yuuki wasn’t sure what to say to that—it had been Yamada’s first kiss too, what kind of coincidence was that?—but remembered what he said on Sunday. How nervous he’d been, and Yuuki had thought he was worried about being beat up, but… “Are you embarrassed because it felt good?”

“Don’t say it like that.” He shuffled, uneasy—nervous—on the step, and sighed. “But it—it did. It really did. I don’t know if that means I’m into guys or if I’m—if I’m just into _you_ , but it did.”

Yeah, Yuuki wasn’t going to comment on that. Who Yamada was and wasn’t attracted to was his business, not Yuuki’s, and he had a feeling it would go down a route he wasn’t ready to take if he let the conversation take its course.

He changed the subject. “Better start learning how to cook, then.”

Yamada, not ready for the abrupt change, startled a bit, then calmed back down. He wore a smile that said he should have seen this coming. “Yeah, I guess I should.”

“YouCube is your friend, Yamada,” Yuuki said.

“I thought we were friends?”

“We are,” he said, “but I’d rather not get your hopes up by saying we can have a—a cooking party on the weekends. Even if I invite Ryuji to teach us, Leblanc’s kitchen isn’t big enough for three or four people. Plus, Boss might get mad at me. Too many teens in his kitchen. It’ll ruin the atmosphere.”

“It’s not exactly what you’d call a hang-out spot, is it,” Yamada said, letting disappointment wash over him. It made him slump in his seat, one hand rubbing at his swollen cheek, thumb working at his lips. Like he was thinking of the kiss, or of taking another.

Yuuki wasn’t sure how he felt about that, and the spike of fear and excitement that ran through him made him want to run—down the hallway, down the stairs, out the door, as far away from Yamada as he could get. He was finally keeping pace with Ryuji for a good majority of their runs, and Yamada really didn’t seem the type to work out.

He could run.

He didn’t.

“Which is why you need to learn how to cook,” he said. “Segawa might kiss the first guy who makes her homemade hamburger steak. Find out if kissing her feels as good as kissing me. It might not help you figure out if you like guys or not, but it’ll eliminate girls, won’t it?”

“Yeah,” Yamada said. He wasn’t very good at masking his disappointment. “I guess it will.”

Akira was coming home, Yuuki forced himself to think. Akira was _not_ stranded on a newly remade planet and he had _not_ given up and made a new life there. He was coming home, and Yuuki was going to give him every other kiss he had.

Yamada had already gotten one. That was a mistake Yuuki wasn’t going to make twice.

His phone buzzed: a brief **got it** from Futaba as she finally had the time to check for the video.

Yuuki wondered what she’d do with it. Nothing good, that was for sure, and he was glad she was on his side. If he’d gotten her angry enough before, would she have done the same to him?

Then he noted the time. “We should get to class,” Yuuki said.

“Yeah,” Yamada said, and stood, still fingering his cheek.

“Does it hurt?”

“Nothing some ice won’t fix,” Yamada assured him, his grin strained.

Yuuki couldn’t say anything to that, though he knew how much it hurt. How it would make eating hard for the next few days, and he wouldn’t be able to sleep on it. How it would puff up and become tender to the touch and Yamada would wince every time he so much as brushed it.

Ice would help. Yuuki was sure he still had some cream leftover from his volleyball days buried in his closet somewhere; he would have to dig it out.

If Yamada wanted to learn how to stand up for himself, he was going to need friends like Yuuki to prop him up when he was down. Pain relief cream was the least he could do.

“Come on,” he said instead, laughing as Yamada groaned like an old man as he stood.

For now—pain relief cream and Futaba’s odd scheme that she still hadn’t explained and Akira, definitely _not_ living out the rest of his life in another dimension—it was all he could do.

He could cry later. Much later.

* * *

“ _And you’re sure?”_ Casty asked, for the umpteenth time.

Ayatane—raven-haired, red-eyed, his horns curling like a ram’s, his wingspan nearly sixteen feet long from tip to tip, Yusuke guessed—brushed at more dust and answered, _“Yes, I’m sure. If there’s anything else that could be your miracle, the Aru tribe certainly has no record of it._ ”

He beat his wings; dust showered Shurelia and she stared, irritated, as she was coated in more of it; it covered her hair and dress in filthy gray streaks and was smudged across the surface of her bare arms.

 _“We combed the records four times,”_ she told them. _“Four!_ _We’re sure it’s what you’ve been looking for!”_

She sneezed. Yusuke was sure Futaba would be having a fit over an android that could sneeze, if she knew about it. Ayatane patted her head, brushing off dust bunnies.

Casty held the book like it was made of glass and presented it to him. _“Well? What do you think?”_

As she flipped the pages, he saw nothing out of the ordinary—but that wasn’t his expertise, and even though Delta was the one reading, Yusuke couldn’t parse the language. Perhaps Ren or the others would know what to make of it.

 **“It’ll** **have to** **do,”** he picked, the words sounding strange and flat as they came out of Delta’s mouth. **“Thank you for your help.”**

 _“Yes, of course,”_ Ayatane said, patting Shurelia on the head. If his hand stayed there far too long to be proper, no one commented. _“Anything for the people of our ancestors. We wish you well in your endeavors.”_

 _“_ _Yeah!”_ Shurelia chirped, looking proud at last. _“And—and someday we’ll be able to talk to each other again! The people of Ar Ciel and the people of Ra Ciela_ _will be_ _friends like we’re meant to be!”_

Casty giggled, tucking the book away in her bag. _“I hope so, too. Eventually—someday—our descendants will be friends with each other. I just know it!”_

 _“_ _Yeah,”_ Delta said, _“one day, for sure!”_

They said their farewells, Shurelia kept from following again by Ayatane’s hand. He said something about her father, and while she protested, she didn’t move an inch.

 _“Do you really think it’ll work?”_ Casty asked, as they climbed up the outside of the great tower. _“The—the book, I mean. Finding a miracle can’t be that easy, can it?”_

 _“It has to,”_ Delta said. _“And we have to believe that it has to. What good is a miracle if no one believes in it, Cass?”_

 _“Still,”_ she said. _“This is—this is for Prim. What if we try it and it turns out to be wrong? What if we went through all this trouble and it doesn’t work?”_

Delta stopped; Yusuke didn’t fight his decision to turn and feel for the sides of her face. She helped him get there and held his hands, fully knowing that his searching fingers couldn’t feel a thing.

 _“Then maybe that’s what’s meant to be,”_ Delta said. _“That won’t mean it won’t be hard to accept. That won’t mean that she meant nothing to us because we couldn’t save her. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, things don’t work out. She’ll understand, Cass. She’ll know we did everything we could. She’ll know that some stranger in another dimension wanted to save her, too. I don’t want to lose her either, but if it comes down to it—”_

_“You’re prepared for that?”_

_“I’m not.”_ His voice shook. _“I’m not prepared for it. She’s our daughter and I want to save her. But the only other thing I can think of to change her fate is dying myself, and—”_

 _“No dying!”_ Casty yelled, halfway to sobbing.

_“_ _And I don’t want you to die, either. Or Akira. Or Ren. Not anybody, not anymore, not if I can help it. But if it’s one life—if it’s what she wants—I can’t take that from her,_ _Cass_ _.”_

_“_ _I don’t want to lose anyone else,”_ Casty said, softly, weakly. _“Too many people have died already.”_

 _“I know,”_ Delta said.

_“And too many people are hurt.”_

_“I know.”_

_“And you—you think we just have to believe in this—this miracle? That’s too much.”_

_“It’s not,”_ Delta said. _“It’s not at all. You want everything to go okay; you want everything to be alright—that’s all we need. That’s all I meant. Sorry, you’re crying again.”_

Casty smiled, her cheeks dripping tears, and said, _“It’s just like you, though, to think that we can fix everything if we just think about it hard enough and work at making it better. No matter how badly your restaurant did,_ _you believed that people would come back to eat there. And they did, didn’t they?”_

_“Only because you were the waitress.”_

_“Or maybe it was because, after a long day fighting Sharl and worrying over whether they’d make it home that night, they could count on you to be there with your simple menu. It never changed, no matter what happened.”_

_“And no matter what happens now, we just have to believe.”_

Yusuke looked away as Casty continued to cry and Delta did his best to console her. _Desire_ greeted him, ugly and dark against his wall. Yuuki’s portrait was small and insignificant next to it; Akira’s, still sitting on his easel, nearly demanded his attention.

Perhaps he should move _Desire_. It wouldn’t be such an eyesore behind his tower of cans, would it?

 _“Okay,”_ Casty said, after some minutes where Yusuke contemplated getting out of bed to pace and whether it would disturb Nakanohara’s rest or not. _“Okay,”_ she said again, holding Delta’s hands and pulling them away.

There was no way Delta could look at her face—he couldn’t search her eyes for the truth of how she was feeling, and he couldn’t feel whether her hands trembled or not—but he believed enough in her to say, _“Okay.”_

Yusuke guided them back to the Soreil, their hands clasped tight around each other’s, and felt only the mildest pangs of jealousy.

Casty handed the book over to Ren and Kanon as soon as she stepped into the restaurant; they huddled around it even as Sarly and Tattoria crowded in, reading upside down.

The shop wasn’t quiet as they did so—off-duty PLASMA troops and that family down the street and a few of the people who didn’t like eating alone now that their families had been taken by the Sharl continued to eat and make conversation—so their exclamations went largely unheard. Akira was cornered by the chattering group of Sharl he and Kanon had been entertaining, their wings and fingers and mouths coated in sticky sugar.

His hair was combed. Yusuke wasn’t sure who had done it, only that it finally looked decent—but if he had to guess, it had been Kanon. Anyone else would be too rough; Kanon was patient enough to play games with the Sharl, explaining and reexplaining the rules as they forgot in their excitement.

 _“You guys look like you’re having fun,”_ Casty said, wandering over and steering clear of the table with its wobbling tower of glazed donut sticks. The Sharl cheered as Akira pulled out another and handed it to her.

 _“You can play, too, if you want,”_ he said, gesturing to the tower. _“We’ve played four games and this is how far we’ve gotten.”_

A Sharl with cat ears and a tail concentrated hard before pulling out her own stick; the upper half of the tower collapsed to groans of disappointment.

 _“_ _Five games,”_ Akira amended. The Sharl stacked the tower back up, splitting the broken sticks between themselves; one took her share over to a man in the corner and Yusuke looked away as he thanked her with a kiss on the cheek.

(Could _everyone_ find love but himself?)

 _“Sure, why not?”_ Casty said, settling down in Kanon’s vacant seat. _“It might be a while before they get through that book, anyway.”_

_“The miracle?”_

_“That’s what Ayatane told us,”_ she said. _“If it is, it must be coded—look, Sarly has her notebook out.”_

Akira hummed, glancing up briefly enough to catch a glimpse. He clicked his tongue as his stick broke halfway out of its spot, and said, _“Must be, yeah. How long do you think it’ll take to decode?”_

 _“Dunno.”_ Casty offered the stick she pulled to Delta, who took it mindlessly. He was quiet in the busy restaurant and frowning at nothing in particular and likely didn’t even know what he was being given. _“That’s up to them, isn’t it? In the meantime, we can go back to Ar Ciel and gather some of those rare ingredients. If it’s from there it’ll make use of them, I’m sure.”_

 _“_ _Maybe, maybe not,”_ Akira said, frowning at his hands before scrubbing at his forehead with the back of his arm. He sighed. _“This game should come with a wet towel.”_

 _“It should,”_ Casty agreed.

 _“Yes, it should,”_ Kanon said, causing the group of Sharl to chatter some more. She smoothed out her robe, then folded her hands together to watch them play.

Casty looked behind her to where Sarly was scribbling furiously in her notebook, Tattoria flipping pages at her behest, and asked, _“So, uh, how’d it look?”_

 _“It is certainly something we could not have accomplished five thousand years ago when the trust between human and Genom was at its lowest,”_ Kanon said. _“It calls for perfect unity between us all, a sharing of knowledge one possesses but the other does not, and the harmony that would result.”_

From Casty’s blank look, the words were lost on her.

Akira blinked. _“You mean Synchronization?”_

 _“No, not quite,”_ Kanon answered, and devolved into an explanation that Yusuke couldn’t follow. He doubted that anyone in the vicinity could, save for the Sharl, who were more interested in the game on the table than in Kanon’s words. They knew them instinctively, the way Yusuke had with painting, to the point that he had often wondered if it would be better to quit school to focus on his art.

He never had seriously entertained it—Madarame would have been livid if he had—but it had worked as a nice daydream as he sat in a too-warm or too-cold studio and tried to keep from falling asleep at his easel in the middle of class.

He focused only when Akira said, _“No, I don’t think I quite understand it, but you don’t need to explain again, really—”_

 _“Are you sure?”_ Kanon asked, an eagerness in her tone that she only used when speaking of the Genom and their long, long history with humankind. _“I’m sure I can find a way to explain that makes sense even to you, Akira.”_

_“No, really, I’m—uh, good, and we’re out of Wobbly Glace, so I’ll just—get some more!”_

He wandered over to the bar, ready to wait for Ren to finish serving a young boy his Catty Lunch. Yusuke wondered when the game had devolved into simply eating the sticks from the top—likely when most of them were too broken to continue using as pieces—and Delta, who had been quiet for so long that even Sarly was looking his way, concerned, asked, _“Is it a miracle?”_

The young boy asked Akira something too low for Yusuke’s phone to receive. Akira nodded; the young boy grinned, kicking his feet on his barstool.

Kanon paused to think, ducking her head. _“If you had asked me that five thousand years ago, I would have said it was,”_ she said slowly. _“True unity between the Genom and humans has never been achieved, and yet this book calls for it. If—if there is, truly, a miracle within its pages, I believe it will only occur when we have achieved what it desires.”_

 _“But we have, haven’t we?”_ asked the man in the corner, with a small pile of sticks on a plate in front of him. His Sharl girlfriend went over and took his hand, and together they stared at Kanon. _“_ _We’re working and living with the Sharl now. Isn’t that what it wants?”_

 _“That’s hard to say,”_ Kanon admitted.

Sarly came up behind her and said, _“Don’t worry. We’ll figure this out. Give us some time, though; it’s proving a bit more difficult than we thought.”_

_“But—but it’ll happen? Soon?”_

_“As soon as we can manage,”_ she said. It wasn’t an assurance, but the man would spread it around regardless. The people of the Soreil would become even more wound up than they already were, anticipating the end of their long, long search for a homeland.

Akira returned to the table, order placed and the boy he’d been talking to munching away at his dinner. The flag that had been in his meal was tucked behind Akira’s ear; he fingered it and took a breath as the boy began chatting with Ren, asking what it would be like to have miles and miles of grassy hills to run through, what it would be like to have a house as big as a mansion, what it would be like to have so much space and freedom that there was no possible way to use it all.

Yusuke didn’t blame them. He had spent so long searching for the same thing himself and waiting for it to come to him; he couldn’t blame them for their excitement and their questions.

He only wished it all turned out alright.

* * *

Futaba crashed into her computer chair. Homework: complete. Club stuff: complete.

(Futaba was kind of antsy to have their project done by the school festival, but even she didn’t want to sit on her hands on this one. Nope, not happening.)

She punched a key and rolled her socks off as her computer woke up, and…

Search: complete.

If her mom saw her, she was as good as dead, but this was for Nishima, who had managed to boost her composition score from a measly seven to a forty in almost half a year. She owed him _something_ , and she was going to repay it. Could he really get mad at her for doing this?

Probably. It _was_ illegal.

So she parsed the data: hundreds of thousands of phones across Japan that had received the new-and-improved app, the app gone in most cases but the underlying connection still there to trace. Hundreds of thousands of failure codes not unlike Nishima’s successful one, and only a handful still active. Sakaki’s success was the only one so far, but as she browsed through his phone, she found the app itself was gone, like all the others. Like a failure.

What she would give to get a look at the code on an active one…

Still, this had been the hardest part. Parsing every smartphone in Japan for a very specific set of unusual code wasn’t something that could be done overnight—Ryuji had gone slack-jawed with that glazed-eye look when she tried telling him the specifics—but she had done it.

So she killed her virus dead and ate dinner and then condensed the list down to the still-active apps, and—

She knew that number.

Futaba squinted at the screen; took off her glasses, cleaned them on her shirt, then reread.

She knew that number.

“What the fuck, Inari,” she said, because—

He still had it? He still had it and hadn’t _told_ anybody? He still had the app and hadn’t even told _her_?

And—going into complete stranger’s phones was no problem, okay? Futaba would never meet any of these other people, ever, in her entire life.

But—Inari? With the app?

And he hadn’t _said_ anything?

That was just—it was cruel. Weren’t they friends? Didn’t he know by now that she could keep a secret? Was he seriously being an enormous jerk about this by keeping it to himself when he knew Futaba was interested in the app’s code?

She leaned back. Maybe that was why. He’d been there when she’d wheedled monkey-boy into stealing Nishima’s phone; he knew the lengths she would go to to satisfy her curiosity. Inari knew she would want nothing less than a complete copy sitting in her hard drive, and just copying Nishima’s nonfunctional app had taken the better part of a day. How long would it take to get a complete copy? How long would Inari be left without his phone?

She couldn’t do that to him, but…

“You lied,” she told her computer. “You lied, you ass. Did a kid even throw your phone away or was that you, too?”

Her computer didn’t answer. If only it could.

Life would be one-hundred percent easier if it could.

For a second she contemplated barraging his phone with text messages, maybe include a few hyperlinks to fancy art sites that she would make sure had a virus or two.

But, if he’d been keeping a secret from her—from them, from all of them—he could always ignore it. Ignore her. They could go back to the way things had been in that first week at the hospital, when she’d been too afraid to talk to anyone.

Instead, she did what she did best: she looked into his history. A lot of visits to Nishima’s forum and for long periods of time, too. Frequent checks of his email. The occasional search for cooking videos and some American painter with an afro. Too many YouCube playlists of classical music.Not much else; he was always kind of boring that way.

And, now that she thought about it some more, it really wouldn’t do her any good to confront him about it. Inari could be as tight-lipped as a clam sometimes, when he wanted to be; who couldn’t, after they learned to shove everything that bothered them into the darkest pit of their mind? No, it wouldn’t do her any good, and it really wouldn’t be good to go shouting it from the rooftops. Monkey-boy would get pissed and stay that way. Nishima would be devastated.

No, it wouldn’t do her any good to mention it. She could—she could try to get him to talk about it later, maybe get him out of his apartment more—his GPS had been left on, and he had barely left the place more than once or twice in the last couple of weeks. He was only leaving now because school was back in session.

That… wasn’t the Inari she remembered. The one who stayed out too late sketching cattails at the lake, who stood around for hours people-watching at the underground mall, who took long, meandering walks in the rain just to hear the noise of it hitting his umbrella… _That_ was Inari.

Maybe… maybe she should invite him out somewhere. He’d have plenty so say about Akihabara, and she’d been dying to go back to the planetarium. Inari would like it there, she was sure of it.

What she wasn’t sure of was whether to breach the topic at all or let him take his time. She wanted answers _now_ , damn it, and slow and patient had never been her thing.

But he’d gone this long without saying a word. He wasn’t going to crack just because she started bugging him about it; if anything, he could just clam up even harder—even more? She wasn’t sure which one was right—and pretend he hadn’t lied…

Futaba groaned, kicking her feet and pushing hair out of her face. People were hard, and stupid, and stubborn, even when they shouldn’t be; helping Akira come home would be way easier if he just learned to share.

She huffed. Well, she could share first.

One screenshot of her search results and a simple text of **so is there something you want to tell me?** later, and Futaba settled in to wait with a semi-blurry cellphone video and audio from a lapel mic.

She still had a reputation to ruin, after all.

* * *

The good thing about being grounded with a workaholic of a mother was that she inevitably forgot to check in.

The bad thing about having a workaholic of a mother was that, while Shinya could have gone home and kept to his curfew like the good boy he wasn’t, he had no motivation to. She wasn’t going to be there, and she wasn’t going to believe that he’d gone straight home after school when he never used to before.

She was so goddamn difficult. His homework was easier to understand, and he sighed as he finished the last page and actually—ugh—considered doing more just to keep busy.

“Oh, so this is where you’ve been, Oda,” someone said from the doorway to the classroom, and Shinya grunted. One hand went up to his ear and the cut, the one his mom had sprayed a liquid bandage on before cradling his face and insisted that it was all for his own good.

But the guy at the door didn’t quit. “I thought you were part of the Going Home Club. Is that the homework I gave out today? You’re already finished?”

“It was easy,” he said. “It’s just a pain to do.”

“Oh,” said the guy, with a laugh, “you’re one of _those_ students.”

“Fuck off,” he muttered. In the empty classroom he may as well have shouted it, but the guy—the _teacher_ , Shinya reminded himself—just laughed some more, dodged his way around the desks and chairs, and took a seat. Not the one right in front of him, but off to the side a bit.

What the hell was he doing? Was he being _considerate_?

But it wasn’t as if Shinya could tell him not to look down on him, because—

“It’s a shame about your hair, Oda,” Mr. Mori said.

“It’s just hair.”

“If it was ‘just hair’ you wouldn’t have waited so long to cut it,” he said. “Did you do it yourself? Those cuts look rather nasty.”

“My mom cut it. She’s not that great with scissors.”

Mr. Mori hummed. Shinya made himself look out the window—golden sky spotted with clouds in between a pair of skyscrapers that almost made it look like a painting—instead of focusing on the way the teacher leaned forward in his seat, studying him.

He waited for the accusations: and did you want her to cut it; wouldn’t she have been careful after the first; wouldn’t she have been careful, period.

Instead he asked, “Do you like math, Oda?”

“It’s just work,” Shinya said.

“Not when you were gambling, it wasn’t,” Mr. Mori said.

“That’s different. Money’s real.”

“Is it? I think it’s the same.”

“What the hell do you _want_?”

“For you to look at me while we have a conversation,” Mr. Mori said.

Shinya very nearly clicked his tongue—it was there, pressing against the roof of his mouth, waiting—and dragged his gaze back over from the window. He was no king anymore, able to do as he pleased, and now everyone knew it. That asshole gym teacher had practically crowed with joy at the sight of Shinya’s haircut, mismatched as it was. The only decent thing about it was that everyone could also see his ears and the cuts and know that he hadn’t gone down without a fight.

He met Mr. Mori’s concern with that kingly air of indifference anyway and dared him to say anything.

He didn’t. “Do they hurt? The cuts.”

Of course they did. It didn’t help that Shinya had been touching them on and off all day, either. “No,” he lied. “If you’re here to give me some bullshit lecture about how I can do it if I try, don’t bother. I don’t want to hear it.”

“What do you want to hear, then?”

A fucking apology from his mom would be nice. “Nothing,” he said.

“That’s not true. Everyone wants to hear something.”

“Well, I don’t,” Shinya said. Mr. Mori had a faint scar right above his eyebrow; Shinya focused on it, wondering how he got it, what a boring teacher whose only joy in life was bothering his students could do to get a scar. Would his cuts scar, too? Would he have to hide them for the rest of his life, and all because his mom had to have her way?

She was just like everyone else, and now he knew it.

“Well,” said Mr. Mori, still in that patient tone that was just as grating as that asshole gym teacher’s I-told-you-so speech, “even if there’s nothing you want to hear, there’s something I’d like to say. Is that alright?”

“Stop dancing around it and tell me, then,” Shinya spit.

Mr. Mori looked from him to his desk, where the workbook sat. Pages of completed problems because Shinya didn’t feel like going home and didn’t have the money to play around at the arcade anymore. Pages of them, because he’d rather tackle hard numbers where the solution was set in stone instead of following the fickle whims of human feelings. “You’re smart,” he decided on, after a while.

Shinya wished his eyes could shoot lasers; maybe then Mr. Mori wouldn’t sit there and try and tell him the obvious.

“You’re smart, Oda,” Mr. Mori said again. “If you just did your homework, your grades would be stellar. No one would care how you wear your hair.”

“Or they’d care more because I wouldn’t look like a smart kid,” Shinya shot.

“If that were the case, every top scorer in the school would be wearing glasses. But I do understand your point—the rest of the staff would be in an uproar if a high-scoring student did half the things you do.”

Like gamble on his lunch breaks and refuse to cut his hair for months until his mother held him down and did it for him. Like refuse to do his homework because there wasn’t any point to it.

“Does school bore you, Oda?”

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It used to bore me, too. I couldn’t stand sitting around at home studying or working through another practice test when I could have been doing anything else. I had friends I wanted to hang out with. Do you—”

“Shut up.”

“Would you like to make some, then?”

“I have a friend, damn it,” Shinya said, if only to get that pitying look off Mr. Mori’s face. “He’s a big, fat geek but he’s my _friend_ , and—”

“And?”

He thought of Kaoru, with his hands moving to cover his birthmark when he was nervous in crowded places. Dumbass Kaoru whose dad had an actual tattoo in the same spot and was never embarrassed to show it off, where his son would where polo shirts and turtlenecks even in the middle of summer to keep it hidden. Shinya had hated that shit; he’d looked hot and uncomfortable out in the sun, sweating his weight in water in under an hour.

Kaoru, who liked to wear t-shirts at home. Kaoru, who Shinya had convinced to start wearing t-shirts outside of his apartment, too. Kaoru, who hadn’t needed to be there when Shinya had gone home, who had tried his best to get across to Shinya’s fucking idiotic mom.

“My mom called him a delinquent,” Shinya finally said. He tapped the side of his neck. “He’s got this birthmark, right here, and she thought it was a tattoo. She hates him.”

“That’s a bit harsh, isn’t it?”

“It’s true.” And it made Shinya chuckle, thinking of how Kaoru had done nothing but see him safely home, only to be yelled at. The gratitude that had flashed on his face when Shinya stood up for him, though, that was nice. It was almost like Kaoru had never had someone to stand up for him, ever. “When I told her she was wrong, she started screaming about how I couldn’t be friends with a delinquent. She didn’t know a thing about him. I would have told her he goes to cram school and does the laundry and cooks dinner, but no, she didn’t give a damn.”

He wasn’t inclined to say anything else—nothing about how Kaoru’s dad was probably an ex-yakuza, or how he ran an airsoft shop, or about how Kaoru had gotten kidnapped the night before and Shinya had been so worried he’d cried for the first time in ages—and none of it would help Mr. Mori understand that Kaoru was anything but a delinquent.

If anything, Shinya was the delinquent. He’d been proving himself as one for months, now, and all he had to show for it was his terrible grades and his cut ears.

“That sounds very hard, Oda,” Mr. Mori said.

“I’m not going to stop being his friend just because she hates him,” Shinya said. “He’s _my_ friend, not hers. So stop looking at me like that.”

“Sorry, sorry,” Mr. Mori said, fighting back a laugh. “But, what are you going to do about your mother? As your teacher—”

“You’re concerned,” Shinya said, at the same time he did, and huffed a sigh.

Goddamn adults, butting in where they weren’t wanted.

“I am,” Mr. Mori insisted. “You didn’t even try to hide how upset you were when I asked where your summer homework was. That’s not the Oda I remember from before break. If something’s going on at home and it’s affecting your schoolwork, that’s enough cause for me to be concerned, isn’t it?”

“There’s nothing anybody can do about it,” Shinya told him. “And as long as I’ve got Kaoru, I’ll be fine.”

Mr. Mori took his time answering, staring out the window—when had the sky gotten that dark? Why hadn’t the evening bells gone off by then?—and they listened as a sports team wrapped up practice, all laughs and groans and the very distant thud of running feet.

“I want to be someone you can talk to, too, Oda,” he finally said. “You might not like me saying so, but what’s going on with you isn’t normal. It isn’t uncommon, but it isn’t normal. I want to be an adult you can trust.”

Kaoru’s dad was probably the only adult Shinya could trust, and he had only talked to him three or four times in the past six months. Kaoru’s dad had let him touch one of his models.

Kaoru’s dad had also given them a pointed stare, like he had a hunch as to what was going on but couldn’t believe it had come true. Kaoru’s dad had looked like this, when they’d come slogging back into his apartment, Shinya’s eyes red and puffy and Kaoru’s hand a little swollen where Shinya had gripped it until the bones creaked.

But.

“What makes you think I can trust you?”

“You told me about your friend, didn’t you?”

“How do you know I wasn’t just complaining?”

“You could have said anything. ‘He likes to play too many games,’ or ‘He likes those idols they show on TV,’ or ‘He gets too into talking about his favorite drama.’ Anything like that, but you trusted me with your friend, with who he really is. You trust me enough to understand that your mother’s reaction is absurd, when presented with your friend’s character. You care about him enough to defend him to a stranger he is never going to meet, all because of a birthmark you know has given him no end of trouble.”

“He didn’t do anything,” Shinya said, as they both stared out the window. No scars or fresh cuts in the reflection in the glass, either. Just dusk, early in the city. “He never does anything, but everybody hates him anyway. They’re shitty people.”

“Like the ones who tell you to cut your hair.”

“It’s just hair,” Shinya said. “Hair grows back. But he can’t just cut off a birthmark, and everyone’s too busy judging him for it that they don’t fucking think that there’s nothing he can do about it.”

Mr. Mori hummed; the evening bells rang, and the announcement that played out ran between them. “School’s closing,” he said, more to himself than to Shinya.

Shinya wasn’t five. He knew what the bells were for.

He packed his things up. Mr. Mori said nothing about the scraps of paper caught in between the pages of his textbook and lining his schoolbag as he crammed everything inside, though he did pick one up as it fell to the floor and looked it over.

“Say, Oda,” he said, as Shinya got up and slung his bag over a shoulder.

“What?” Shinya bit.

“If you want to stay late and do your homework, there’s always an extra seat in the faculty office. I’ll make sure no one bothers you, and you can ask questions if you need to. Mr. Ishinuma is always so busy with his teams that he’s not going to be there.”

As if Shinya ever thought the asshole gym teacher had a spot in the faculty office. He’d entertained the idea that an unused storage room out by the fields was his office, and he would have to fight bags of volleyballs and soccer balls and racks of baseball bats and tennis rackets for enough desk room.

Then he thought of the other students, coming and going at all hours: the goody-two-shoes class reps, the student council members, the ones on cleaning duty… They’d be there, too, and they would stare and whisper and Shinya wasn’t going to deal with that.

He’d rather sit in an empty classroom. At least he wouldn’t feel like a freak.

“Nah, don’t think I will,” he said, and left.

Mr. Mori chuckled to himself, left behind sitting in a desk that was too small, sure that someday he would see more of that proud Oda, who showed off his friend the same way the other kids his age showed off expensive accessories or a new video game.

Maybe he didn’t need to worry too much, after all.


	24. Ra Ciel Reincarnation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to the messiest final boss fight you will ever read. Enjoy!

Yusuke trudged up the stairs to Leblanc’s attic, phone a heavy weight in his pocket, the bag slung over his shoulder digging in. It rubbed at his neck and he pulled it away for the dozenth time since leaving the station.

“Yo, Inari,” Futaba called from the couch, perched as she usually was on the edge of her seat. The pair of plates and cups in front of her steamed, and while it smelled as delicious as it always did, Yusuke found he had no appetite.

“Futaba,” he said, stopping in front of the table. He’d sat in her spot months before; if he focused he could still feel the warmth, and the ghost of Yuuki’s scent drifted through the air. Like a reminder of what he couldn’t have, it teased him, over and over. He hated coming to Leblanc these days. “Your messages—”

“Sit down, shut up, and eat,” she ordered. “We can talk after.”

He did so, taking his time. Futaba, for once, wasn’t scarfing her food down as if it would disappear the moment she stopped, alternating between doing something on her phone and eating.

Well, at least he wouldn’t have to lie about eating lunch today.

And when the food was gone and they were sipping at bottles of water, cold from the fridge, Futaba said, “You got the app.”

“Yes, I did,” he said, “but—”

“You have the app. Right now, on your phone. Don’t lie and tell me it was on the one from before; I ran the search myself. I remote-accessed all the other phones, even that Sakaki guy’s, just to be sure I wasn’t wrong. You _have_ it. You lied.”

He couldn’t say anything to that.

“Why’d you lie?” she asked.

“Because I’m a selfish man,” he said, staring at his drink. “Because I wanted my friends to enjoy being with me for me, not for what I could offer them. If Yuuki knew I had it, what do you think he would do? If you had the app, Futaba, what do you think he would do?”

“I’d tell him!” she said. “I’d _tell_ him! We could spend our weekends here helping Akira! They could talk when there wasn’t anything more important to be doing! I wouldn’t be some selfish jerk trying to keep it to myself!”

Yusuke let his eyes slip closed. The world surely was cruel, if a hermit like Futaba was stating she would be a better friend than he was. Weekends with Yuuki—yes, he had thought of that, but all of Yuuki’s attention would be on Akira, not on him. Not on Yusuke.

Never on Yusuke.

He sighed, tired of the constant reminders. Yuuki was never going to love him, and Yusuke had made sure of it. His foolish, coward’s heart had steered him down this path and he was only just realizing, too late to change a thing, that it wasn’t the course he wanted to take.

“It’s not right to keep it from him,” Futaba went on when he said nothing to defend himself. “It’s not right and you know it.”

Yusuke shook his head. “It’s done, Futaba.”

“You can still say something!”

“No,” he said, firmer than he would have liked and harsher than she was prepared for. She flinched; he winced, internally, at the sight. “It’s too late now. Akira needs every ounce of concentration he has in order to fulfill his goal; if Yuuki were to step in now, everything we’ve been working for will be put in jeopardy. We won’t have a second chance at this.”

She turned away, staring out the window, biting her lip.

“You’re upset I lied, and I understand that,” he added. “It has upset me too, keeping this from everyone. It hurts, not being able to be completely truthful with you all. But—one day—when this is all over—I’ll tell you everything. All of it.”

Futaba was quiet for a few minutes more. She chewed her lip raw, phone forgotten on the table, and worried her hands over her knees, searching for something to say, anything to say.

He could—he could meet her halfway. If she knew he had the app and hadn’t said anything until now, he could trust her to keep his secret a little while longer.

“Would you like to watch, Futaba?”

“Watch… what?”

“The birth of a new planet,” he said, tugging his phone out, “recreated through an ode to their unborn star, their mother earth. Akira will be giving his best; it’s bound to be delightful, despite the danger.”

“I was just yelling at you,” she said, watching the phone carefully as he set it on the table.

“You were.”

“And you—you want me to watch while you—uh, play?”

“As long as you promise not to be distracting.”

She chewed her lip some more, licked at the blood that welled up there, and nodded, suddenly that shy girl he remembered meeting at the second rehab center. Too afraid to ask, too afraid to speak out, but also too afraid to stay quietly sequestered in her room.

Then she said, “As long as you promise you’ll spill the beans when it’s over.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “You have my word,” he assured her.

She was warm where she pressed up against his side. Smaller than Yuuki, and the arm of her glasses dug into his shoulder, and she smelled differently—but she was warm, and she was here, and she wasn’t calling him a traitor to everything she had ever known and loved, and that was all Yusuke could ask for.

With a press of a finger, he started the app.

* * *

Kaoru frowned from his desk.

“Don’t,” Shinya groaned. Telling him about Mr. Mori’s weird proposition was probably a mistake, but Shinya was trying to be more honest with him, if with no one else.

And it couldn’t be a weird thing just to him, right?

“Alright,” Kaoru said with a shrug. “But it’s nice to know someone else cares about you. I’ve got my dad, but—”

 _But you don’t._ He didn’t have to say it; Shinya knew it, the same way he knew his mom’s care was some kind of front for being a shitty, absent parent. She had to know everything because she couldn’t know everything. She wasn’t around, so she had to make herself known when she was.

God, he hated her.

“I don’t need to be pampered like a teacher’s pet,” Shinya said from Kaoru’s bed. Whenever he visited, it was always made, and he found he liked messing up the sheets, like it was proof that he ‘d been there, if only for a while. “And I don’t need any friends he tries to make me make out of sympathy, either.”

“I think all he wants is to be someone else you can turn to when you need to,” Kaoru said. He rubbed at an ear; Shinya’s had finally scabbed over and peeled until there was nothing left but the faintest of lines, but Kaoru could probably see them. Kaoru always could. “If things get bad with your mom at home, no one’s going to believe me, but they’ll believe him. He’s a teacher and an adult. They’d have to.”

“Mom wouldn’t do anything to have me taken away,” Shinya said. Or she hadn’t so far, vaguely aware of what it meant to be a mom and overselling it by a lot. Shinya was pretty sure parents weren’t supposed to be so clingy, or so unwilling to listen to their kids, or the perfect rendition of a harpy.

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah. She’s annoying, but” —and it hurt him to say it, but it was true, damn it— “she loves me. She’s all I’ve got, family-wise. I’m all she has, too.”

Not every mom could be syrupy-sweet all the time. His mom was bitter on her good days and sour on her worst, but she was his mom.

“Shinya,” Kaoru said, and from the look on his face he was at a loss for anything to say that wasn’t pitying.

“I’ve had lots of time to think about this,” Shinya told him.

“Obviously,” was the response. Then, quieter: “You know you can’t defend her forever.”

“I can’t. I know that. One day she’ll have to realize that if she doesn’t quit it, I won’t want to be around her anymore, right?”

“How does she not know you already don’t?”

Shinya shrugged. The answer to that was obvious: they were around each other for maybe half an hour every day, if they were lucky. It had just never come up, and aside from the way she had to remind everyone and herself that she was Shinya’s mom, he might have mistaken her for a roommate.

He was going to hate her guts for the next stupid, showy thing she decided to do, though.

“Anyway,” he said, reaching for his phone, “I thought you said you were ready?”

He frowned again, this time scratching underneath his collar. He was back to his polo shirts, even at home, and he was blaming the autumn chill despite it being September and still hot enough to make Shinya feel like he was about to melt most days. “You didn’t have to wait to finish it,” he said.

“You’re the one who’d bug me for the plot if I did.”

“But—now? You want to do this now? I thought we were still talking about your mom?”

“I’m tired of talking about her,” Shinya said. He waved his phone. “If you don’t want to, I’ll go home and finish it myself. Won’t be able to tell you what happens, though.”

Kaoru still frowned. “I didn’t even know you could finish a mobile game.”

“Is that a no?”

“No, I—” Kaoru sighed. “I do.”

Then he looked at the bed—at Shinya sprawled across it like he owned it—and at his desk, where Shinya would have to lean over and wind up with the worst backache in order to play.

He sighed again. “Move over, you’re in the way.”

Shinya pushed himself up as Kaoru crawled over, pressing in tight and warm against his shoulder. Just like on the train when they’d held hands, Kaoru said nothing even when Shinya’s hands shook and navigated his lockscreen.

Kaoru was warm. Kaoru was the heat of the sun, pressed all along his side, trickling down even to his toes. Even if he made a mistake, Kaoru wouldn’t chide him for it.

So different from his mom and the cool distance in her hugs. So different from the way he had to brace himself for whatever came next: her words; her hands on him, pinching and prodding and pulling; her concern like a burr that he could never quite pull out of wherever it had lodged itself.

So different.

With a press of a finger, he started the app.

* * *

“Wait,” Casty said, at the base of the stairs to the Singing Hill. “Let me see it one more time?”

“Again?” Delta asked, but waited while she dug around in her bag. Akira and Earthes paused on the stairs; Akira braced himself against the robot’s frame, pulling fabric out of the way.

The outfit was ridiculous: the white coat was too tight on his shoulders and the back streamed all the way down to his calves, and the boots he’d been forced into were too big. Ren’s advice of wearing thick socks helped, but the way Renall had pursed her lips as attendants laced them up told him she wasn’t happy with the design on them.

They’d been the only pair. What was he supposed to do, insist someone give him theirs for a day?

The whole thing was awful, but it was better than the alternative: Akira would sooner die than put on anything that looked so obviously like a military uniform. The thing had had epaulets and an over-the-shoulder sash and was festooned with a bunch of glittering, decorative medals and was in a green color that he knew wouldn’t show well against his skin.

He shuddered at the memory. The bells and small, glowing lights Renall had insisted be woven into his hair jingled. The headache was already there; he had to resist the urge to scratch at his scalp for some relief, even as his head tilted to the side to relieve the pressure.

It didn’t matter how nice the finished product looked if he felt like a Christmas tree.

 **Are you nervous?** Earthes asked.

“A bit,” he said. “I’m more eager to get out of this outfit, though.”

Even though Renall and her team of seamstresses and tailors had rolled their eyes at his steadfast refusal to wear the uniform and had worked for three days without sleep to patch this one together instead. The vest was too long and covered his hips and was so stiff with embroidery he wasn’t sure what color the fabric was underneath.

He liked the pants, though. Those were normal and roomy enough that his legs didn’t feel as if they were being strangled. He’d have to thanks those tailors later, somehow.

If they survived. If he survived. If this worked and wasn’t a complete failure.

 _It’ll work_ , he told himself. _It has to._

Casty pulled out the miracle with a small sound of triumph. She rested a hand on the tube—over the glowing, swirling flower inside, red like blood and her and Goro’s eyes—and said, “It’ll work. It has to.”

Akira looked away, out to the expanse of space that bordered the Singing Hill. Delta said, in a tone so soft and gentle it made his heart ache, “That’s right. It’ll work. It has to.”

“It has to,” Akira whispered to himself.

**It has to.**

_For Yuuki’s sake, too_ , he thought as he returned to climbing the stairs, taking in the stray thoughts of the man behind Earthes: Yuuki, crying that day so many weeks—months—years—ago; Yuuki, so forlorn he didn’t even want the comfort of his friends; Yuuki, working so hard for Akira’s sake, and enduring so much more than he had to.

He said nothing about the aching desire that accompanied each one. He was the same: if Yuuki was hurting, he wanted nothing more than to wrap him up in his arms until it was better, to keep him safe until the moment had passed, to assure him that he was loved in a world that didn’t seem to care for him.

But he would be able to do all of that, soon. Once this was over—once all of this was over, and everyone was happy—he could go back to the family he’d left behind and make a new one with Yuuki at his side.

“It has to,” he told himself again as they approached the top. Unlike the last time he had stood here, there was nothing there: empty space where there used to be a planet large enough to fill the horizon, its heart a pinprick of light leagues upon leagues beneath Akira’s feet.

“I’ll make things right,” he told that heart.

To the ghost of the planet looming in his eyes, he said it again, “I’ll make things right.”

**You** _**are** _ **nervous.**

He wanted to laugh. Dressed up like a peacock, standing atop the lives of a million souls, holding the fates of hundreds of thousands more in his hands, in his voice—how could he dare to be anything but nervous? “It’d be hard not to be. But—you’re here with me. You’ll keep me safe. The rest will be up to me.”

**You’ll do fine.**

Akira couldn’t help but smile at that. He hoped it wasn’t too dry; _fine_ was never the word he’d use to describe his performances. Something always went wrong.

And now—and now he couldn’t mess up. He couldn’t ruin this for all of the people of the Soreil who had been waiting for so long just for this chance.

But another him had achieved it. Peace and a planet to call home. Goro, alive and well. If another him could do it, he could too.

He could. He could.

 _Please, wait for me just a little longer_ , he prayed. To who he didn’t know; there was no god here who could or would listen to his prayers, after all. If there was, Akira would have been home a long, long time ago.

He opened his mouth, loosened his throat, and Sang. The words flowed like molasses; time slowed to a crawl. Something deep in his gut squirmed and he cut off with a grimace as the floor beneath his feet shook.

Already. Already, something was getting in his way.

A giggle, from up above.

“Prim,” he said, not surprised to see her. She and Goro had been the only ones actively working against them, and Goro was gone.

“I think we have enough energy now,” she said.

“Prim,” he said again, louder.

“Yeah, that thing, from before—the… whatever it was. Totally useless. This’ll work, though.”

“Prim!” Delta and Casty shouted, as they ran up the stairs.

“Hm?” she said. “Oh, them? They’re her parents. I thought you knew that.”

“She can’t hear us,” Akira told them.

“Yeah, it’s a shame. Gotta take them all down if we want to bring Goro home, right?”

“She might not be able to,” Delta grit out, “but whoever’s controlling her can. Hey, asshole!”

Casty sighed. “Delta—”

“That’s our daughter, damn you!” he went on to shout anyway. “Let her go! Right now!”

Prim sighed. “Sorry, but I’m in this ‘til the end. I have to make some kind of effort, don’t I? And if it brings him and Goro back home, won’t it all have worked out in the end?”

“You don’t even care?” was Delta’s retort.

Prim looked down on them all, a blank look on her face. She raised a hand; the Soreil, on standby above the Singing Hill, descended and shook. The great tower retracted; the outer surface shifted, metal plates sliding in and out of place. Akira hoped the ones still inside were alright.

If they got hurt because of this, what would he do? If they all died, what would he do?

“If you want her back—” the one behind Prim said, voice cold and calculating—

The thing behind her moved, stretching arms and legs and a dragon’s head. It opened a mouth large enough to swallow the Singing Hill whole and roared.

“—then I’ll give her to you,” she finished. “That is, if she wants it badly enough to fight me for it. If Prim loves her Mommy and Daddy so much—if she wants to return—then she has to win.”

(“That’s too much, Shinya,” Kaoru hissed in his ear.

“Maybe I want to see how much she loves them,” Shinya said back. “Maybe I want to tear their happy family apart. Look at them. They love her.”

Kaoru sighed. He fiddled with his collar, too uncomfortable to say any more. That suited Shinya just fine.)

“In the meantime, I’ll just keep on going, shall I?” Prim said. “One lost, wayward little boy found—another on the way. Let’s get this over with.”

Akira took a step back—the curling dragon’s tail swiped back and forth, its claws reaching for something to tear into—and nearly collapsed at the splitting headache as Prim began to Sing, her words like barbs threading under his skin and trying to pull him apart, the melody sinking down into his blood like a burning poison. It wasn’t nearly as strong as it was before, when it had felt as if every bone in his body was going to be ripped out and the very air had burned in his lungs—

**Let him go.**

“This will help you, too, you know,” Prim said, through her Song. “He’ll go back to where he’s supposed to be. Everybody wins in the end. What’s so wrong with that?

**An ending like this is no good!**

“Talk about pushy,” Prim muttered. “These are all kidnappers, aren’t they? They deserve whatever punishment they get. You can’t tell me you’re trying to stick up for them.”

Delta yelled. “Haven’t we done enough to repay that?! The ones responsible—they’re long gone! You’re only hurting innocent people!”

“Innocent or not—real or not—what’s the difference?” Prim shrugged. “Once they’re all gone it won’t matter.”

“Damn you,” Delta growled. Casty stepped up beside him with conviction in her eyes even as her lips quivered. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and readied herself.

All for the better. Akira could barely stand, much less fight.

“Just leave this to us and take care of Akira!” Delta yelled over his shoulder. His tonfas unfolded with a practiced flick of his wrists, and he sank into a stance with ease—

—just in time to block the heavy strike Prim unleashed, her gauntlets a solid wall of steel bigger than Delta’s head and more than capable of bashing his skull in. Casty barely flinched at the surprise of the attack, sinking down into that trance state all Songs came from, her mind focusing on nothing but the words and the shape of her magic. It was a new one: a giant horse made of air and corrugating darkness, and the deep, intense hatred that rolled off it had Akira reeling.

He took a step back. Delta gained enough room to counter, his tonfa barely nicking Prim’s stomach as she launched herself out of the way only to come back in with a barrage of attacks that Delta could barely block.

He took another. “You’re not getting through me,” Delta vowed.

Another. Prim laughed, the smile on her face sharp enough to cut. “We’ll see,” she said.

Akira couldn’t follow the flow of blows that followed. Neither Delta or Prim gave away when they were hit, but the solid-sounding smacks of metal on flesh meant that more than one or two landed. Casty flinched whenever Delta was hurt, her worry overriding the flow of the song for the briefest of seconds. Akira wasn’t even sure how long the fight lasted; it could have been minutes. It could have been seconds. It could have been hours.

It could have been days that they stood there before Casty deemed her spell potent enough to finish the fight—and it did, trampling over the lone enemy and unleashing all of that hate in a single, devastating blast.

When the smoke cleared Prim was struggling to stay standing.

“Just give her back,” Delta said, fists still clenched—and then he was looming over her, as if proximity to his rage would make the man on the other side of the screen give up. Prim grinned again—

“—just out of luck, aren’t you?” Akira could hear her mocking. And since when had all the heat left his body? Why was he so cold?

… Why couldn’t he see?

… Why couldn’t he _move_?

He had to get up. He had to move. He had to leave this nothingness that was the insides of a god that had swallowed him again without him being any wiser.

He should have learned. He should have known better. Helping as many as he could only ever put him in danger, and now he couldn’t even Sing. The Song taunted him, drifting through his ears forever unfinished.

… But those high notes weren’t his. That was a woman’s range, not his own tenor.

… And that, that was a man’s bass, rumbling deep below hers. There were two of them—four of them—

Sixteen—

Forty—

A hundred—

A thousand.

His Song, Sung by a hundred thousand innocent people, their wishes intertwining with the hope he’d given them, and he couldn’t even move his lips to join them. He couldn’t lead them the way Ren and the others thought he could. He was useless in the end.

**Are you saying you can’t fight anymore?**

Earthes was still there? Earthes could hear his thoughts?

So Akira wasn’t completely gone, like he’d been last time. There was the same nothingness, but the thread connecting him to Earthes was still there.

**Are you saying you can’t Sing?**

“I can Sing,” he tried to say, but his throat refused to work—or maybe he just couldn’t feel it working. Maybe he just had to try a little harder.

“I can Sing,” he said again—his ears were working just fine, he could hear his own Song being Sung back to him, so why couldn’t he hear himself talking?

Why could he hear them, but not himself?

Were all of his efforts going to go to waste here?

**All of** _**your** _ **efforts?**

(“Way to be harsh, Inari,” Futaba mumbled.

“If he isn’t able to see that everyone has been putting in the same effort as he has, can he truly unite all of those wishes?” he asked. “Saying he cares just to turn around and do as he pleases, without understanding the value of the work those under him have been doing… Can he create a planet they’ll accept like this?”

The Song was tinny through his speakers. Futaba had reached for her phone several times but decided against picking it up to record. She said, “I dunno. Maybe not?”

“He isn’t only carrying his own hopes. He’s carrying the hopes of thousands: mothers and fathers, children and orphans, the sick and the elderly. They’re with him whether he recognizes that or not. He is all the hope they have left.”

Futaba rolled her eyes—typical Inari, waxing poetic when Akira was really only doubting himself for an instant. It was hard to see the good in life when trapped in the dark, and doubly so when it felt like any effort to leave was ignored. Unseen, unheard, like a ghost walking the earth…

Hell.

Even still, Inari picked, **We’re with you.** )

 _You’re with me_ , Akira thought. _And them, they’re with me, too. All of those people are fighting for their own future._

“And I won’t let anyone else lose their future,” he said. This time his voice was a buzzing in his ears, a faint sensation in his throat.

If he remembered right, that meant next he would take a breath of natural, fresh air—

Except he gulped it down, eyes rolling behind closed lids as _nothing_ was filled with _something_ again.

Nonexistence, even for a few minutes, was far more than he ever wished on his worst enemies.

“Akira,” Delta called out, his voice a touch too loud.

Casty asked, “Are you alright?”

“I think so,” Akira said. His head didn’t ache, not quite, but he still wound up pressing a hand to his temple, just to make sure it was still there. It found that convoluted hairpiece of bells and lights instead, and he tried not to think of the hours Renall’s hairdressers had spent carefully braiding it all in. “Where’s—where’s Prim? And Goro, is he here, too?”

“He’s fine, but he’s still knocked out,” Casty said. She helped him sit up until he saw Goro, sleeping peacefully on the other side of the platform. “It might take him a while to wake up.”

“And Prim?”

“Well, uh…”

She wasn’t looking at him. She was looking instead to the edge of the platform, where Delta was kneeling, his hands stretched out in front of him, fingers curling around air. Prim was curled up on herself in front of him.

She could be hurt. She could be dying.

“You should go,” Akira said. “I’ll be fine. It was—was just a surprise, that’s all.”

Casty didn’t argue. “Thanks,” she said instead, and rushed over.

He heard Prim’s weak, “Oh, Mommy’s here, too,” and busied himself with wishing the phantom pain he felt all over to go away. Getting to his feet was a chore that shouldn’t have required as much groaning as he put into it.

But if these were Prim’s last moments, he didn’t want to eavesdrop, even on accident. He could still hear the Song, but it was fainter now, more a ringing in his ear than the full chorus it had been—

Prim grunted. Her groan gradually worked into a shriek that ended with, “You have to! Now!” She got to her feet almost like a puppet with its strings being jerked every which way, talking, alternating between the bored voice of her controller and her desperate cries.

(At some point Kaoru’s hand had drifted to hold his where it held his phone. “Shinya, I think that’s enough,” he said.

“She hasn’t won yet.”

“You’re going to make her fight you until she dies?”

“Just look at her. She wants to,” he pointed out. “And didn’t you say before that there was every chance that if I ever lost the connection, she’d die, too? This was inevitable.”

“But you want her to fight you—”

“So what?”

Onscreen, Prim was pleading with her father: use the energy Shinya had stolen just moments ago to fuel the planet-making Song. Don’t worry about her. Prim wanted to see everybody happy, and she couldn’t do that if they were all merged with the god-ship-dragon thing, so do it. Do it already.

He could hear her say it, but couldn’t see her when she said it; his vision was too blurry to focus. “She has to win,” he said, pressing the screen, forcing her forward. Toward her father. Toward his death or hers. “She has to win. She _has_ to.”

“Why does she have to win, Shinya?” Kaoru asked.

Shinya thought it was obvious. How could Kaoru not see it? How could Kaoru not see the value in watching someone else fight tooth-and-nail for what they believed in, even at the cost of tangling themselves in the strings that had pulled them along for so long and strangling themselves?

Oh, right: because Kaoru had a good dad. Because he was loved and cared for and not smothered when it was convenient. Because his dad gave him space to be himself and find his own way, and Shinya—Shinya had always stupidly believed in everything his mom told him that he hadn’t noticed how caught in it he was until the last few months.

That was why Prim had to fight. People like her and Shinya had to scrape up every bit of happiness they could, had to take it right from their controller’s hands.

That was why she had to win.)

“You have to!” she yelled. “Please!”

“Alright,” Akira said. His breath was back, and Goro was okay, if still asleep. He could Sing.

Casty whirled around, mouth open to argue. Delta caught her arm and shook his head and she said, “But—but it’s not—everything’s okay, isn’t it? She’s fine! Prim’s fine! It can’t—it won’t—”

“I’ll need help, Prim,” Akira said, over her protests and her sobs. “Sing with me. I know you can. We’ll make this new planet together.”

“Together…” Prim sighed, one foot inching forward. She had no pitch—she was fighting too hard to focus on that—but she managed a weak, “ahih=mak-yan…”

“That’s right,” Akira said, forcing a smile at her efforts. One breath later, and his voice was calmer and smoother than it had ever been before.

He Sang. The great god-like being that was the ship shuddered and flailed; Delta pulled Casty out of its line of fire, gritting his teeth at leaving his daughter there instead.

He Sang, and let the heartfelt wishes of the hundreds of thousands aboard the Soreil lift his voice into new heights.

There were so many of them. So many people, so many wishes, so many tears. He couldn’t let them down.

He never could.

“Earthes,” Akira said, the robot taking its place as a shield in front of him. “Please, for just a little longer… Can you protect me?”

 **Always** , Earthes said.

“Good,” he said, and let his voice join with the others, with Prim’s, with Delta’s and Casty’s behind him.

The ship shuddered. Weapons Akira didn’t know it had came out: lasers Earthes deflected; the sharp point of a lance that could have bisected Akira if it landed, nicking his side instead; a barrage of missiles exploded against Earthes’ barrier, their heat scorching his face. The robot fired back whenever it had the chance until Akira’s ears hurt from the retort of the guns in its arms.

And what was nothingness beneath them roiled into a ball of fire and magma bright enough to burn the eyes; the ship roared, and flailed, and its next attack clipped his leg this time, the wound burning with a persistent heat—

(Futaba had Yusuke’s arm in a vise-like grip, staring at his phone with her eyes wide. Every time he failed to produce a barrier in time she flinched as Akira grunted through the pain.

But she said nothing more than a whimper that might have been a plea for this to go well, for everything to turn out all right. If Sakaki’s videos were to be trusted, it would, as long as Yusuke could continue to protect Akira. He needed time—he needed all the time he could get, as the energy the ship had taken in was stolen back. Distant clouds formed on that molten ball of fire, millions of years passing in the blink of an eye as it rained—the magma cooled in places but overran it in others, the land nothing more than chunks of rock too small for the untrained eye to see.

Yusuke could. They were distant, but they were there, gathering what little rain fell on them in even smaller pools.

And then he realized that Futaba was humming along, off-pitch and almost tuneless.

It was… rather easy to join her.)

—but Akira hung on, grit his jaw, and kept Singing. This was for everyone, he thought as a missile whirred past his head. It was for himself, too, that weak little boy who’d come here but had gained so much because of it: irreplaceable friends; a husband; the confidence to stand in the way of a god, not just in front of a crowd of hopeful, shining faces and be the grand emperor they thought him to be.

The newborn planet beneath them cooled in patches until the surface was black with lava rock and filled with lakes and rivers, estuaries reaching out fingers connecting each into seas. It glittered in the light of the sun, one endless ocean—and that just wouldn’t do.

The ship shuddered, and this time as it roared, a compressive energy field forming between its hands. That made his head ache again, sharper than before, and there was no air in his lungs for a brief, startling instant—

And then it was gone. He Sang with an even fiercer voice than before; Prim was crying, now, trapped in the middle of a step. Her whole body shook with effort to keep from getting any closer, and she was Singing with everything she had left.

She was giving up everything for this. He had to make it a beautiful planet, one she’d be proud to call her own. One she would be proud to die for.

He could hear Casty behind him, crying even as she Sang. Delta’s tenor wobbled with emotion.

He could even hear, very faintly, what sounded like the Song coming from Earthes, too.

If even he was willing to stand by them and Sing, despite not knowing the words of their hearts—the words that came to Akira like scents on a breeze, or the bubbles rising from a deep, deep lake—then Akira really had gotten a wonderful guardian. The best guardian.

The one who would take him back to Yuuki.

Down on that blue planet, islands were beginning to emerge. Akira imagined them with sheer cliffs taller than the Soreil and sandy beaches and filled with more greenery than he had ever seen in his life; others became flat, rolling plains where the grass danced in the wind; yet more were home to mountains and valleys with rich ore veins and even richer soil. There were tundras in the north and deserts lending it a golden belt, and all of it was _theirs_.

The ship roared once more; with one last shot, it went limp as the last of the stolen energy was lost.

Prim gasped; she fell to the floor, strings cut.

(Shinya bit his lip so hard it started to bleed.

“Shinya,” Kaoru began to say, soft and close and—

“Shut up,” he said, wiping his face on his arm.

Kaoru forced him to put the phone and the unresponsive app down, then pulled him in.

“I lost,” Shinya said into the circle of Kaoru’s arms, into his chest, into his shoulder. He was so warm.

“I saw.”

Shinya coughed up a laugh. “I should be mad. I lost.”

Kaoru patted him on the back and said, “You didn’t lose. You gave that girl everything she ever wanted when everything she cared about was taken from her. You didn’t lose; you helped her make it all right. Look at her. She’s so happy, Shinya.”

“She’s a weirdo,” Shinya muttered. He looked back down at his phone, at the girl being cradled in her father’s arms as she took her dying breaths and broke into pieces that floated away.

To where, he could only wonder. Maybe she was heading back to that god, the one that ruled that universe. He’d muttered the coordinates so many times since Kaoru’s kidnapping that the numbers were etched in his head.

He reached for his phone. Ran a finger across her cheek as she nuzzled her dad and said something about how she wished she could see the pretty planet they made together. It was so dark, she said, how strange, she could see just a minute ago…

Shinya rattled off the coordinates. “I hope you make it, Prim.”

And shut his phone down on her face and her happiness.)

Casty had been too emotional to move more than single step, and braced herself against Akira. “That’s right,” she said when he helped her over, “it’s beautiful. And you made it happen, Prim.”

“Prim did, huh,” Prim said, weaker than Akira liked. She smiled without knowing where her mom was, without seeing the look on Delta’s face as he finally let himself cry. He squeezed her tighter.

She broke into a thousand motes of lights, each one tiny and delicate. They drifted around the Singing Hill before dissolving, and through his tears, Delta said, “We still have the miracle. We just—we just have to believe.”

“Right,” Casty said. Her grip pinched Akira’s arm, but it was no worse than the injuries he already had, so he held his tongue and let her grieve.

The inevitability of it all pierced him the most: the god Zill had become was always, in every possibility, going to consume as much energy as she could. Prim was just her naive puppet—Prim and her controller were just naive puppets, as there was no way Zill wasn’t so delusional as to think that what she was doing wasn’t the right thing.

She’d only been trying to help, in her own way, but look where it had gotten them.

And there had been a time where Akira himself had wished for miracles of his own. He had waited for so long for them to come true, but they had in the end. He said, “Even miracles take time. Let’s—let’s go back, make sure everyone is safe.”

No one could argue. Delta nodded, heaved himself off the platform, and took Casty by the hand. They headed for the stairs, passing Earthes standing by Goro’s still unconscious form, heads tucked together. Casty sobbed anew as they hit the first step.

Akira let them gain a decent headstart as he scooped Goro up into his arms. The boy weighed next to nothing, but after the Song and the fight and the still-hurting injuries he may as well have been a hundred pounds.

“Make sure I don’t fall, okay?” he told Earthes, who nodded.

They went slowly. The Hymmnesphere was comprised of more stairs than Akira had ever thought possible to put in a building—not to mention the ones leading up to the Singing Hill, which were steep and plentiful enough to rival a shrine’s—and his body burned with effort by the time they reached the airbus. Delta and Casty were already strapped in, dozing or resting after the ordeal.

Akira made sure Goro was strapped into a seat, turned on the autopilot, and settled in.

Earthes was still there.

“Well, we did it,” he said, softly enough that it could have been lost under the whir of the bus’s engines. “I guess there’s no need for you to stick around anymore.”

**I’m not leaving yet. Not until you’re home.**

“We’ll have to cut Delta off from you, then. He deserves it, don’t you think?”

**More than deserves it.**

(And besides, Yusuke thought as Futaba cried on his shoulder, it would finally give the two time to properly date. He hoped it went well.)

“You really are a good person, huh?” Akira mumbled. He wasn’t sure how much of it was audible; the bus was dark and the engines were almost soothing and he was suddenly so tired it was hard to keep his eyes open.

“Thank you,” he said, the words nothing more than a murmur, “for being here. For being my guardian. For staying. For—for everything. Everything you’ve done for me and these people and for Yuuki. It might get boring from here on, but… Stay a little longer. Like you promised.”

* * *

**Always** , Yusuke picked, despite Akira falling asleep before he could pick it. He hoped the sentiment got through regardless.

He hoped he dreamed of better days and peaceful times.

Futaba waited patiently, still crying on his shoulder as he maneuvered the robot when the airbus touched down. The team of PLASMA troops waiting for them at the airfield cheered, the vanguards waving their weapons, their partners setting off small Song Spells that took the shape of fireworks.

It was proof that even weapons of destruction could become something beautiful, Yusuke thought.

“What now?” Futaba asked, as the troops filed onto the bus. Someone was going to have to carry Goro and Akira, who didn’t wake when they were shaken—Akira leaned in even closer to the robot, grunting a bit in his sleep—and there was a quiet competition out on the tarmac as to who would have the honor.

“Planning, I suppose,” Yusuke said. “There will be cities or towns or villages to house thousands. Farms and shrines and things of that nature, and observing the planet for severe weather. I can’t imagine the effect creating an entire planet in an hour would have on its ecosystem.”

“That’s not what I meant, you dork.” Futaba punched him, though it did little more than sting for a moment. “I meant what are you going to do about Nishima?”

Oh. “This isn’t a guarantee that Akira and Goro will be coming home. Sakaki managed to get this far, and his Akira and Goro decided to stay. They no longer had any reason to believe that a way home existed, and the miracle we had hoped to bring about did not occur.”

“So you’re not going to tell him.”

“Not until I’m sure.”

Because otherwise Yuuki was likely to do something terribly drastic, and Yusuke had to be sure. Until the song that would tie them there and sever all connection to their homes was sung, there was still a chance. There would always be that chance. Yusuke wasn’t going to sit back and say it was all over just yet.

One of the PLASMA troops out on the tarmac let out a whoop; his companions groaned in defeat. One of the few vanguard women was carefully picking up Goro from his seat; one of his hands found a lock of her hair and gripped it in his sleep, and she moved to let the man coming up the ramp have room.

When he reached them, he said, _“You really did it, ‘uh?”_ and grinned, showing off several more chipped teeth than the last time Yusuke had seen him. He gave a smart salute. His grin wobbled but held steady even as a few tears traced his cheeks.

Then he went to work unbuckling Akira, who groaned and shifted but made no move to wake fully, and with a bit more care than Yusuke would expect, had the boy—the man, the emperor, their savior—sitting lightly on his back.

Yusuke shared the soldier’s single nod. There was a save point out on the field, and he accessed it and shut the app down. No matter how much time passed on Earth, it would only be a minute or two there on the Soreil. They would lose no time waiting around for him.

“I suppose you’re disappointed,” he said, setting his phone down on the table. “You’ve been working on cracking the code for months, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, but I kinda gave up on it,” Futaba said with a shrug. “Not only did I not have any active apps to copy the code from, if it was anything like Nishima’s it would have taken me years to do it. Interdimensional, instantaneous communication isn’t exactly something modern science can understand, but it would be _awesome_ to be the one to crack it.”

“You make it sound as if it’s nothing more than a phone call.”

She shrugged again, a grin twitching her lips. “If we could make it work both ways, it could be.”

“You may as well be suggesting that we can phone the dead, Futaba.”

“That’d be nice, too,” she said. “Think about all the parents and grandparents we’d be able to know that way. Think about all the friends we wouldn’t have to really leave. Think about all the death threats Madarame would be getting. That’d be nice, huh?”

Yusuke tried to imagine pale, passive Amano calling Madarame in the middle of the night, disrupting his precious rest to give him a death threat. He couldn’t; Amano had been drawn to the lighter side of life for as long as Yusuke knew him and it had shown in his works, but that could have easily been a facade. No one who was truly happy drank the paint water.

(He had a feeling it was more than just paint water, but never dared to ask.)

But, “I think I would like that,” he said, imagining his mother instead, calling in the early morning when four-year-old Yusuke was having another nightmare, insisting that Madarame treat her boy better—that he treat all of his students better—and invoking curse upon curse when he didn’t.

Futaba shut her eyes, envisioning her own phone calls to the dead and beyond; whatever her mind came up with made her say, “Yeah, I’d like that, too.”

They sat for a while in the quiet attic, the clatter of the cafe downstairs oddly distant, the droning of the evening news a murmur. Futaba began humming Akira’s Song after a while, as off-pitch as she was before.

Yusuke was too content to dissuade her. He hummed along, sure that at any moment she would stop and the moment would be gone.

She didn’t. They sat there, humming a melody whose words they had already forgotten until the rumble of their stomachs and Futaba’s alarm brought them back to reality.

Dinner that night was sweeter than Yusuke recalled it ever being.

* * *

When Kaoru finally let Shinya go, he couldn’t feel his hands anymore. Despite his phone being off, he’d continued to clutch it. It was easier than clinging to Kaoru, even if his hands missed the warmth; they were cold and tingled as blood rushed back into them.

Kaoru didn’t quite let him go, latching onto his shoulders. “Shinya,” he said.

Shinya grunted.

“Shinya,” Kaoru said again, “I’d like it if you took that teacher up on his offer.”

“Why?” Shinya asked.

“Because I don’t want you to get hurt.” His hands were so heavy. So warm. They were strong, too; Kaoru managed to hold onto so much more than Shinya ever would, and he’d achieved it all by himself. “And because I don’t want you to be alone except for me. You might not think you need more friends, but having acquaintances in high places—that’s not a bad thing, either. You’re too young to think you have to bear all this yourself.”

“But I always have. This isn’t any different.”

The days when the only thing he heard from his mom was a question of what he wanted to eat for breakfast the next morning. The nights when he had to reheat leftovers because she was working late. The afternoons spent at the arcade because his mom didn’t let him have games or novels—how he’d looked up at the Gun About screen, heard some of the older boys proclaim that he was too short to _really_ play it, and decided then and there that he was going to learn how to play just so he could beat their asses. How Gun About was all he was good at, after a while.

Kaoru said, “Just because you always have doesn’t mean you have to anymore. I’d like to see the kind of person a king could grow up into, too. So don’t—”

“Don’t what?”

Kaoru drew back, keeping him at arm’s length, silent long enough that Shinya finally looked him in the eye, trying to find what was so important yet couldn’t be said.

He found nothing.

“Don’t become a king again,” Kaoru said. “Don’t ever be that distant. Let other people help you. Let me help you; let that teacher help you. If you thought you were great before, imagine what you could be with us at your side. Please, Shinya.”

Shinya couldn’t help it; he started to laugh. “You mean like them?” he asked, tossing his phone to the bed. He heard it slide off and hit the floor but couldn’t bring himself to care; his mom would be angry if it broke, but at this point, why should he care? “The way they could accomplish what they wanted because they were working together?”

“There’s nothing wrong with having a team at your side.”

“And if I can’t trust anybody to stay by my side, how can I trust anybody at all, blah, blah, blah,” he finished.

“Shinya!”

“That hurts.” The regret that flashed through Kaoru’s face in the milliseconds before his fingers began to let go hurt, too; Shinya clamped down on his hands and held them there. Kaoru’s mouth worked and despite nothing coming out, Shinya added, “Shut up. Let me think.”

It was… a lot. He couldn’t remember the last time he went to the arcade. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked through the Gun About forums, disappointed that everyone had already moved on from the King. He’d only been gone a couple of months, but he was just some kid in an arcade; nothing like those pros on TV winning millions of yen in prize money. He’d been lucky enough to earn enough for the next game, and the next, and the next, and still have money left over for lunch the next day.

Kaoru was good. A good person, a good student, a good son—better than Shinya, who liked to waste his days doing nothing. Better than most of Tokyo, or the world, for that matter. Kaoru liked to spend his days when he wasn’t busy at school or cram school or doing chores playing a stupid goddamn phone game and getting giddy over the setting and the characters and the lore. Kaoru had said more than once that he hoped there was a way everyone got what they wanted. Kaoru hadn’t said he wanted a happy ending, but he did—Shinya had looked at all the novels on his shelf and realized they came to hard-fought, hard-won happy endings.

And what had Shinya wanted? To win? To beat the stupid game and then struggle to find something else to connect with Kaoru? No, he’d wanted Prim to win, to beat him and the bitch who’d been lying to them both for close to half a year and to have her earn her happy ending, whatever it was.

Dying wasn’t a happy ending. Killing her family and the people she cared about wouldn’t have been a happy ending. There was no way for him to apologize to her for any of it, now, and he’d made sure she was strong enough to fight him off.

Because—because if Prim was strong enough to fight off the power that controlled her, one day Shinya would be, too. One day Shinya would be strong, and he wouldn’t have to worry about bullies or vengeful classmates or adults who could force their ideals on him. One day he would be strong.

 _I’m still a kid_ , he thought. _I_ am _still a kid. Who the fuck said I have to know everything by the time I’m_ _thir_ _teen? Nobody. Nobody said that. Nobody said that but I believed it anyway._

“Okay,” he said. Kaoru, rather than sag with relief, beamed. The crushing hug Shinya was enveloped in didn’t surprise him as much as he thought it would; this was Kaoru, after all. Kaoru who liked to worry too much and then run off and wind up in so much danger it made Shinya’s stomach hurt just to recall.

That was just the type of guy he was. Better than Shinya by miles in every direction.

“You’ll tell me, though, if something else happens, right?” Kaoru asked. “Even if it’s something small.”

There was something wet spreading by his collar. Shinya wasn’t going to comment on it. “You sure you’ll still want to deal with me?”

“Of course I will. You’re not going to get rid of me that easily, not after sitting in my room while I was a yakuza’s hostage. Nobody I know would do that for me and then call me an asshole after, you know.”

“You just don’t know the right people.”

Kaoru laughed, quiet and soft but there in Shinya’s ear all the same. And it wasn’t mocking or looking down on him or anything like that; it was just Kaoru, and relief, and the crushing force of their friendship all wrapped up in one single moment.

The game was over, but life still went on.

Shinya found he was okay with that.


	25. The Center of the Universe

When Prim opened her eyes, she was standing on the top of a hill, staring down at a small farm. There was a silver-haired woman tending the rows, looking no older than fifteen— _Mommy!_ —and a man who towered over the tomato vines in the next— _Daddy!_ —and a boy with purple hair and pointy ears like hers—she didn’t know him, but she was going to find out—and another man just setting down a full basket of vegetables, rubbing dirt into his hair when he pushed his fringe back— _Ion!_

She didn’t see the big robot guy, but he was bound to be there somewhere.

“Can we go?” she asked.

Goro chuckled at her side. “So impatient.”

“But—but—Prim hasn’t seen them in forever!”

“It’s only been a few months,” said Sarly, in that calm, wise voice she kept having to use because Prim didn’t want to be examined again _just in case_ , she wanted to go see everyone. It wasn’t fair that Sarly could look as young as Mommy but be so much smarter than her.

“But—but—”

“I’d want to go, too,” Goro said, looking down the hill. He looked almost like he was going to cry; Prim looked from the farm—Mommy and Daddy and Ion and she missed them so much—to Goro and back again. Which one could wait? Which one needed her the most now?

“If that’s the case, then you should go, Prim.” Sarly laid a hand on Goro’s shoulder. “We’ll be right behind you.”

“Are you sure?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Are you positive?”

“Just go,” Goro said, and sniffed at the end, and—

She couldn’t help but wrap him in a hug. He grunted, holding back tears. “It’ll be okay,” she told him. “Prim knows a special magic spell now!”

“A—what?” Goro asked, but it was too late—Prim was gone, bounding down the hill as fast as her legs could take her, yelling for anyone and everyone to hear:

“Mommy! Daddy! Prim’s home!”

* * *

By the time Yamada came out of the dean’s office, Yuuki had given up hope. No one spent two hours in a principal’s office being patted on the back and praised, after all—something had to have gone wrong and Yamada was fighting it, and despite Yuuki wanting to burst in and help, Yamada had asked him not to interfere.

“I don’t want to get you involved any more than this,” he’d said, rubbing at his arm. His eyes were green in the terrible fluorescent light, too-bright and harsh.

So Yuuki had let him march in there alone, to deal with the fallout alone, and to be dealt the punishment alone.

It wasn’t fair. But so was outing himself as the maker of one of Japan’s most controversial forums—Futaba’s protection was keeping the police off his tracks, but she couldn’t do it forever, and he didn’t expect her to.

So Yuuki waited, and waited, and when the door finally slammed open it was to a stern-faced dean still sitting behind his desk, somehow looking smug as he started up his paperwork, and to a furious Yamada. Yuuki scrambled out of his chair; Yamada stormed past, not even stopping to collect his bag, and Yuuki scrabbled for it, nearly tripping over his own two feet to catch up.

“How’d it go?” he asked, because he had to, and not because he thought Yamada actually wanted to say.

“Yamamoto’s being ‘investigated,’” Yamada spat, “and I’m being told to transfer or drop out.”

Yuuki tripped; Yamada thrust out an arm. It was a miracle he managed to catch it, and they stood in the middle of the hallway, Yamada’s bag slung in the crook of Yuuki’s arm nearly an inch from hitting the floor. He tugged Yamada in close and whispered, “So they aren’t doing _anything_?”

“Guess not,” Yamada said. He helped Yuuki upright and took his bag, mouth twisted—in anger, or fury, or the weird humor that told him he didn’t need the books inside it anymore. “I don’t want to talk about it here. God, I was so nervous about this I didn’t even eat breakfast this morning—now I’m pissed _and_ hungry.”

“The worst possible combination,” Yuuki remarked. He risked a glance at his phone—Yusuke’s unread message still sat on his lock screen, **There’s something I’d like to talk about** right over the time. “It’s almost lunch. We could call Segawa and talk about it over some food.”

“Your food?”

“Well, uh, it doesn’t have to be,” Yuuki said. Was it just him, or was there a desperate note to Yamada’s tone? Let it just be him, please. Please. “There’s a Big Bang Burger down the street nobody from campus really goes to. We could eat there.”

“Oh, Big Bang,” Yamada said, sounding as if burgers had been the last thing on his mind. Then he sighed. “Sure, fine. I’m too hungry to argue. Think she’ll meet us there?”

She didn’t, texting a few minutes after Yuuki asked to say that she was still in class and would be for another hour or two—labs were killer, and Yuuki still wondered how anyone could bother to sit through them, but then again he could code for hours and not notice the time passing. He wasn’t one to talk. She did want to know what happened, and Yuuki took the liberty of telling her it wasn’t anything good, trusting Yamada to share on his own later.

They wound up sitting together in a booth by the window, Yamada’s attention divided between the people outside and putting onion rings on his Moon Burger. Yuuki felt his jaw drop as he fit the monstrosity in his mouth and took a bite. _No one’s jaw should do that_ , he thought.

Then he made himself eat, barely taking in how crispy his fries were or that they’d put whole lettuce on his burger instead of shredded until he pulled the whole leaf out with a single bite. Ketchup and mayonnaise splattered over his shirt, all over the rings. He cursed.

As he dabbed at the mess with a napkin, Yamada said, “The dean pretty much said that it’s too much trouble to really look into. That I shouldn’t be trying to hurt some girl’s reputation like this. He also implied that I’m trouble because I tried to report it. Asshole.”

Yuuki’s hands shook, swiping the mess across his collar. He’d have to clean the jewelry when he got home. “Sounds familiar.”

“That’s what I told him, too: that it sounded familiar. But when I brought up that coach you told me about he practically dared me to go to the police about it; because it doesn’t involve schoolwork or campus secrets, they won’t do anything about it. It’s not like I was being blackmailed into doing her homework for her. Worst came to worst, he told me they’d laugh it off as a domestic dispute.”

“Would they do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He took another hefty bite; Yuuki set the offending piece of lettuce off to the side and continued scrubbing at his necklace. Intuition told him they’d at least look into it; that’s what the police were for, after all. That same intuition told him they wouldn’t look very hard; Yamamoto was born-and-raised Japanese, and Yamada wasn’t. They’d hem and haw over giving him details before saying there was nothing they could do and dropping the case like a hot potato.

“Could you sue?” Yuuki asked.

“I’d need proof of damages, and right now,” Yamada shrugged. Still just a student and jobless, and no less than three people from the mixer had come up Yuuki in the halls today asking if he was alright. There was no way Yamamoto’s rumor was gaining traction, but if it was, no one was going to notice now.

Yamada stared down at his burger. Yuuki picked his back up and dared another bite.

All that work for nothing. All those hours spent worrying about it when he should have been sleeping, or doing homework, or checking on the forum—for this?

It wasn’t fair. God, it wasn’t _fair_.

“But we have her on tape, don’t we?” he asked, after swallowing a lump that might have been food but might have been congealed ash. “We—we have her on tape admitting it! Doesn’t that count for something?”

Yamada snorted, rolling his eyes. “What we have is a recording of me backing out of an agreement and her resorting to pleas so I keep my end of the bargain. If her parents aren’t putting serious money into this school, I’ll be surprised.”

Or she got to the dean first, which—Yuuki could see that. Running up to him, tears in her eyes, voice breaking as she tried to explain to him the horrible people who were trying to ruin her. Of course he’d believe that. Of course she’d do it.

Yuuki looked at his burger, wincing. “That’s—that’s not fair,” he said.

“Yeah,” Yamada said. “I know.”

He somehow kept eating, sneaking in bites of Yuuki’s fries in between bites of his burger. Yuuki would wonder where he put it all if he hadn’t already seen Futaba and Yusuke decimate three trays of sushi and then nearly half a pizza each, and both of them were as skinny as rails. Ryuji ate ramen and beef bowls like they would disappear tomorrow.

And Yuuki—Yuuki was nibbling at a burger, trying to determine if the weird taste was disappointment or grease.

All that work, for _nothing_.

“I think I’m going to transfer.” Yamada’s declaration came soft, the last bit of his burger falling to pieces in his hand. “Can’t stand it here. All the looks, all the comments—at least back in America I could say something in Japanese and they’d be impressed. Here, I’d have to speak—I dunno, Swahili or something.”

“Someone like Yamamoto might be waiting for you there, too.”

Yamada sighed, his mouth twisting. “Yeah, maybe,” he agreed, although it was clear he didn’t want to. “I don’t—I don’t like being treated like a commodity, but it has to be better than being treated like—like gum on the bottom of your shoe, you know?”

“Yeah,” Yuuki said.

He knew that feeling a little too well.

“And my dad’s there, too. We got along just fine before the divorce—I’m sure if I talk to him he’ll help me out. Even if he doesn’t, I’ll figure something out.”

 _Because I have to,_ went unsaid.

“Yeah,” Yuuki said.

He knew that feeling, too.

“So, uh,” Yamada said, before sipping his drink to think his next words over, “can we—can we still be friends?”

“Sure,” Yuuki said.

Yamada, bewildered by how easily that went, at how he didn’t have to explain the whys or the hows of a long-distance friendship or how easily Yuuki agreed, just said, “Oh.”

“You forget that I met my boyfriend in a weird phone app from space,” Yuuki reminded him. “We talked almost every day for almost three years. I cooked his recipe for Valentine’s chocolates because he couldn’t give them to me himself. He taught me how to cook so I wouldn’t be eating nothing but cup noodles. We’ll find a way to stay friends, Yamada.”

“Oh,” Yamada said, with a choked sound. He nodded, throat working, and looked out the window. People went by: some on their phones, some talking to the people next to them, some holding kids already exhausted from a day’s traveling at noon. They were smiling, laughing, crying, sleeping. They lived in their own worlds where a couple of boys in a Big Bang Burger meant nothing to them.

(They were alive, Yuuki thought. They were alive, and maybe they were struggling with it, like he’d been. They were alive, and maybe they were happy, or waiting for happiness to appear before them. He wondered if they knew what it would look like, if they knew what it would sound like. He wondered if they’d found and lost it, or found and kept it and were going back to it.)

“Everything will be fine,” Yuuki declared. “If not now, then someday. If not then, then someday even later than that. Sometimes that’s the only thing getting me through the day. Yamamoto’s not going to be the end of the world.”

Even if he wished she’d get what was coming to her a little sooner. She had all the makings of a stalker, the worst kind of clingy girlfriend, and Yuuki pitied whatever guy would fall prey to her charms.

“Yeah,” Yamada said, turning from the window. “You, uh, don’t have to cry about it, though.”

“You’re not supposed to mention it,” Yuuki told him, reaching for the napkins. Yamada pressed one into his hand, and he wiped up the few tears that leaked out. “It’s just—”

“Not fair,” he and Yamada said at the same time.

Yamada sighed, dragging a hand through his hair. “I know it’s not fair. I know it’s not, but—it’s better than being expelled because of her. It’s better than trying to find a job and getting turned down for shit reasons when they just don’t like my reputation. And America’s kind of more… accepting of people like you and me. Japan’s trying, but all that stigma’s still sitting there, untouched. Like the family heirloom you keep in a case just to look at every once in a while, but never looked after.”

“It won’t stay that way,” Yuuki protested. “It—it can’t. It can’t stay this way.”

“Yeah, well,” Yamada shrugged, “until it does, I don’t want any part of it. I wanted to like it here, but if the place doesn’t want to like me back…”

Then there was no need to stay.

Yuuki fought down the questions that thought formed: what would you do if you couldn’t leave; what would you do if you were forced to like it; what would you do if you never had a choice or a say in anything except to agree?

But he didn’t. He knew how easy it was for a person’s will to break, and how the pieces left behind dug into the annals of the mind like icebergs drifting over the ocean: seemingly small at the surface but enormous on the other side. Yamada would break over there. Yuuki would break over there, the same way Akira had.

So it was good, that Yamada had the chance to leave and was taking it. It was more than Akira had gotten; it was more than Yuuki had gotten, too stuck on pleasing his parents and too scared of Kamoshida’s wrath to entertain thoughts of quitting the volleyball team and transferring to a different school for very long.

“When are you leaving?” he asked.

“As soon as all the paperwork’s filed, I guess. I don’t have much; it should be enough to fit in a suitcase or two.”

“You’ll tell me when you leave, right?”

Because if someone else just disappeared from his life with next to no warning, Yuuki wasn’t sure what he would do.

Yamada didn’t think very long on that. “Yeah,” he said, smiling for the first time since he stepped out of the dean’s office. Yuuki forced himself to look away from dimpled cheeks—why in the world did they draw him in every time?—and looked him in the eye instead. They were brown now, dark and warm under the sunlight streaming in through the window. He wasn’t nervous anymore. “Of course.”

Yuuki’s phone buzzed with a message. Yamada took their trash over to the cans as he read it.

Alibaba: **so r u coming or not**

He thought, briefly, of saying no. He didn’t have to listen to whatever Yusuke wanted to say; he could head home after class to check the forum again or get a head start on his homework, but part of him insisted he should go, that if Yusuke was asking to meet it was for a reason.

That part sounded an awful lot like Akira.

Yuuki mulled it over on the way back to campus, Yamada texting at his side. Something in English, when he dared to risk a peek before returning to looking at the sidewalk with a guilty flush on his face. He fished his phone out of his pocket.

Mishima: **I’ll give him five minutes**

* * *

A month.

By the time fall set in in earnest, that pervasive chill in the air had settled into Yuuki’s bones. A month since Futaba had started sending him cryptic messages that everything was going to be okay, please don’t stand so close to the subway railings, one day she would explain but not right now; a month since he and Yusuke started talking again, even if it was limited to brief texts whenever they found time. A month since Ohya contacted him with an update about her article; apparently it was doing so well a news station had contacted her about it. He’d told her to do what she liked, as long as the Amamiyas and Ms. Akechi were alright with it.

… Just as he hoped everything was alright now, with Yusuke calling him to Leblanc all of a sudden. This was going to be Bad, Yuuki could feel it; that wriggling, squirming feeling in his gut was too strong to be anything but a premonition. Maybe if he turned around right now, or stalled for time buying a baked sweet potato—he could _smell_ them, they were _somewhere_ —maybe Yusuke would give up whatever this was, and they could go back to the status quo.

Whatever that was anymore.

But, no, he couldn’t do that. He was trying to be better and braver—he was trying to be the kind of man Akira would want to date, even if it made him incredibly uncomfortable—and that meant meeting Yusuke face-to-face instead of text-over-screen.

But he really, really wanted to turn around and run for the station—he could hear the slap of his shoes on the pavement already—

“Yuuki, man!” Ryuji said, suddenly right beside him, a slight sheen on his face. He grinned even as he panted, “Man, it’s a good day for a run, huh?”

“Maybe later.” If he strained himself too much he might pass out or be sick or both, and at that moment nothing sounded better than to stop moving, crawl under a blanket, and refuse to come out for several days.

Ryuji’s grin fell. “Dude, I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“You’re clearly a witness,” Yuuki said. “I don’t know what for, but it’s obvious.”

“Yuuki, dude, seriously,” Ryuji said, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. Yuuki groaned at the weight, then again as Ryuji shook him. “Nothing’s gonna—okay, maybe something’s gonna happen. Let me stand behind you in case I still wanna punch him.”

“You’ll break him in half if you do that.”

“And then Ann’ll break _me_ in half,” Ryuji said. “She made me promise to sit down and listen to him, but I don’t know—I don’t know if I want to. I don’t know if I can.”

“How late is her shoot?”

“Late,” Ryuji groaned. “I knew she was popular, but damn it, I wanted her to be here. Why’d it have to be today?”

“I don’t know,” Yuuki said. They were going to have to meet up in person one day anyway, and the sooner the better, right? But Yusuke should have wanted some kind of buffer between him and Ryuji, and Ann was perfect for that, and she was supposed to be off tomorrow. She and Ryuji were going on another of their gym dates.

This could have waited, just like how Leblanc’s door could have waited another few feet to come into view. They stared at their reflections, Yuuki’s fingers twisted around the necklace and through the rings, Ryuji grimacing as he tried to force a grin and failed.

“You sure you want to?” Ryuji asked. “We can still back out.”

“I want to,” Yuuki said, but it sounded weak, flimsy, like he wasn’t actually sure. He cleared his throat and tried again: “I want to. I’m tired of worrying about it. Let’s just get it over with.”

Ryuji sighed and reached for the door. “Alright.”

When his arm fell away, Yuuki shivered at the cold. Even in the cafe where it was warm and Boss was telling them to head upstairs, it wasn’t much better. Nerves, Yuuki thought, and swiped a hand over the back of his neck and found beads of sweat there. Just nerves. Always nerves.

The attic was cleaner than he remembered it being a few days ago. Futaba was perched on the end of the couch, close to the desk; Yusuke stood by the window, looking down at what he could see of the street. His fingers tapped on a leg; the other rested on a bundle of cloth he’d set on the other couch.

It was a fairly large bundle. Yuuki took a seat next to Futaba and didn’t ask what it was.

“Inari? We’re all here,” Futaba said after a while, when they’d all been seated and sitting in silence heavy enough to choke for several minutes. Ryuji was nearly doubled over and kept clenching his fists, then unclenching them as he realized he was doing it.

“Right,” Yusuke said, more to himself than to them, as if he’d gotten lost in thought standing there, watching people pass by. The hand that had been tapping at his jeans reached into his pocket and tugged out his phone; he tapped at the screen as he turned, took a few steps, and then placed it down on the table.

He said nothing else before turning back to the window and the people outside and the fabric of his bundle, and that was alright by Yuuki. His brain stuttered to a stop as the screen registered—he knew those lines of code, he knew that particular sequence almost by heart—and Ryuji’s did, too, as he leaned over the table to get a look at it.

“Inari?” Futaba asked, but if Yusuke answered it wasn’t verbal; Yuuki had no eyes for anything but the screen in front of him. He pulled it closer, sure it was some kind of trick.

Ryuji moved closer, staring so intently there was a crease between his brows in his reflection—and then the app loaded.

 _Akira_ , was Yuuki’s first thought. He was sitting at a table with Goro, idly playing chess, and was saying, _“—drift any closer we might just lose the connection entirely. I’d like to say goodbye; it’s the least we can do.”_

 _“_ _You called him and he didn’t answer, didn’t you?”_ Goro argued, moving a piece. _“Isn’t that proof enough that he’s not coming?”_

_“We don’t know that! Maybe he’s busy. Maybe he’s sick in the hospital.”_

_“Then he’s not—oh, he’s here.”_

Ryuji hissed something between his teeth. Futaba leaned in closer to the screen, her hair brushing Yuuki’s arm. Akira turned around in his seat and smiled and said, _“There you are! We were beginning to think you weren’t going to come. I didn’t, uh, bother you with that call, did I?”_

 _“_ _At least it worked,”_ Goro commented, rearranging the pieces on the board.

Akira slapped his hand without turning around. _“We agreed not to cheat, Goro.”_

 _“_ I _never said I wouldn’t. You were the one who crowed you could beat me without it, then started the game without waiting.”_

Akira groaned a bit at that, and Yuuki couldn’t stop himself from saying, “Akira.”

Akira froze. Goro froze too, and then said, _“You never talked before.”_

 _“_ _No, that’s—that’s not—”_ Akira stumbled out of his chair. He took several shaking steps to the monitor. _“It’s not—not him, it’s—it’s Yuuki.”_

_“_ _Yuuki?”_

_“_ _Yuuki,”_ Akira whispered, soft and hopeful. _“Yuuki. Say something else? Please?”_

“Akira,” was all he could think of to say. A tremor had started in his stomach. Something warm pressed itself against his back. Ryuji’s arm, maybe, or Futaba’s, or both. “Akira, I don’t—I don’t understand.”

Yusuke with the app, when he’d insisted he’d lost it. Yusuke helping Akira for months and never saying anything. Yusuke, who was still standing at the window, ignoring them all.

 _“_ _I wish I had time to explain it all,”_ Akira said, taking an unfamiliar robotic hand and pressing it to his cheek. Yuuki swore he could feel it, the faintest of pressures on his skin. Behind him, Goro gagged slightly, then started packing away the chess set.

“You don’t? What—what does that mean?”

Was he going away forever? Was he getting ready to cut Yuuki out of his life for good? It was just like the ending Sakaki received; was that why Yusuke wouldn’t look at them? Because he’d failed?

Because Akira wasn’t coming home?

 _“_ _Yuuki, no,”_ Akira said. _“I won’t tell you not to cry, but—I’m fine. Goro’s fine. We’re coming home, Yuuki. We’ll be there soon, I promise.”_

 _You are?_ Yuuki tried to ask, but all that came out was a strangled cry. Ryuji propped the hand holding the phone up and patted ineffectually at his back, which just made it worse.

 _“_ _I am. Even if I have to fight God to do it. Even if_ we _have to fight God to do it. We’re coming home, okay? We’ll be there soon. I can tell you I love you as many times as you want, then.”_

“I’m sorry,” Yuuki said, “for the things I said before—”

 _“_ _Don’t be,”_ Akira said, though his words were twisted by static. _“Don’t be sorry. You said what you had to, and you w—e right to. I never would ha— left that place, otherwise. I_ _—_ _ver would have gotten the chance to meet_ _—_ _many people—make so m—y new friends—to save them all, if_ _—_ _hadn’t been for what you said. Do— be sorry, Yuuki.”_

“But I—I didn’t want to—”

 _“_ _I kn—w,”_ Akira said.

 _“_ _We’re getting clo—r,”_ Goro warned. _“The co—ection —n’t be stab— for mu— longer.”_

Akira nodded. This time his whole body twisted with static; his mouth still moved, working through Yuuki’s name once, twice, a third time. _“I love you,”_ he said, slowly enough that even through the static Yuuki could hear it, plain as day. _“I love you. I love you. I’m coming home soon. Wait for me, just a little longer—”_

And he disappeared. The screen went dark, the connection cut once more; Yuuki would have dropped the phone if not for Ryuji’s hand waiting there to catch it.

Akira was gone, again. Akira was coming home, at last. He wasn’t sure whether to cry out of relief or out of despair, and settled for just crying; someone took the phone and set it on the table and someone else twisted him into a hug. Ryuji. Futaba settled against his back and snaked her arms around his middle, her glasses digging into his back.

Akira—Akira had been _right there_ and Yuuki hadn’t said anything. He’d barely touched on everything he wanted to say—he’d barely been able to talk, confronted with Akira again, Akira with his dancing eyes and the love in his voice and the ghost of his fingers on Yuuki’s cheek.

“Shit,” he said instead.

“Yeah,” Ryuji said.

“Ditto,” Futaba said.

Yusuke said nothing, the bastard; hiding this from them—hiding this from _Yuuki_ , who’d been beside himself with worry ever since the forum went up—what in the world had Yuuki ever done to deserve this?

(What hadn’t he done to deserve this, but—this was a bit extreme, wasn’t it? Was Yusuke that angry over being snubbed last year? Hadn’t they worked through that somehow?)

“Say something,” he said, though it was muffled into Ryuji’s shirt. “ _Say_ something. Why would you—why would you hide this? Why wouldn’t you say anything? Why decide to change all of that now?”

Yusuke said nothing.

“Yusuke,” growled Ryuji, balling his hands into fists that caught in Yuuki’s shirt.

“Right,” came an answer, at last, though he didn’t sound to be moving. It sounded like he was untying something—that cloth bundle, maybe—but that wasn’t an answer unless he had a goddamn poster of it—

Or a painting, Yuuki thought. He’d wrapped one up just like the bundle when he’d brought it for Boss to hang down in the cafe, some weird abstract piece he’d done with his hands to finish his senior year at Kosei. It was still there by the door, catching the light in warm autumn hues—perfect for a coffee shop, Yusuke had said. It described the environment perfectly.

“Shit,” Ryuji breathed, as something else was laid out on the table. Futaba muttered something against his back in awe, her glasses jamming into his shoulder blade.

Yuuki didn’t want to look. Yuuki did want to look. Yuuki wasn’t sure which one he wanted more, but the potential answers outweighed continuing to cling to Ryuji like the world was going to end and crying some more.

He looked, and almost wished he hadn’t.

Akira sat on the table—or his face did, and part of his torso. His left hand reached for his heart, a deep, black ring on his finger trailing feathers; his right pressed against the edge of the frame. He was looking that way, too, with a smile so wide it was a wonder his face didn’t split in half and so loving it made Yuuki want to cry again.

He wiped the tears away; the Yuuki in the portrait next to Akira’s was crying enough for them both. Did he really look at Akira like he hung the stars in the sky? Did Yusuke think his ring looked that good on him, sparkling like stars? The hand pressed to the frame barely met Akira’s fully, too—

“ _Two Sides of A Screen_ ,” Yusuke said, back by the window. He was fooling around with the cloth he’d wrapped the paintings in, folding it and then shaking it out and folding it again. “For you and for Akira, when he returns. They took—quite a while.”

“Yusuke, dude,” Ryuji said.

“Yeah, Inari, I thought—” Futaba coughed, “—I thought you couldn’t paint anymore. You said so. You said it made you sick to.”

“I worked through it,” Yusuke said. “It was—was very difficult in the beginning. All things are. But it isn’t anymore, and that’s all I can ask for.”

“But, why?” Yuuki asked. “The paintings—the app—you never said anything.”

“Because I couldn’t,” Yusuke said simply. “I—I simply couldn’t. Not to you. Not to anyone.”

“Yusuke,” Ryuji said, and whatever anger he’d held was gone. He sounded like he pitied this man in front of him, the one he’d been angry enough at to threaten to hit just moments before walking in the door. He sounded like he was sorry.

“You know how much he means to me!” Yuuki found himself yelling instead. “If—if I’d known you had the app, do you think I would’ve—would have kissed Yamada? If Akira were there, do you think I’d have done any of it?”

“You did _what_ ,” Futaba cried, then yelped as Ryuji pinched her.

“I know how much he means to you,” Yusuke said, turning to look at them all, bunched together on the couch. “I know it very well. You mean the same to him, you know. And I—I’m afraid I’m a very selfish person.” He chuckled. It had only the slightest amount of humor in it. “A very selfish person, indeed. I thought I’d lost you once, and I was determined to never feel that way again, but—fate clearly had other things in store.”

“What does that mean?”

Yusuke went back to looking out the window. His long, pale fingers combed through the end of a messy braid that had to be Futaba’s work. It barely reached over his shoulder and hair slipped out of it with every pass.

Yusuke said, “It means that by keeping secrets, I drove you away. It means that by keeping you from Akira, you went to Yamada instead. Seeing you with Akira would have been preferable to seeing that. Seeing you with Akira would have been easier than seeing that.”

Yusuke continued, very softly, “I thought my heart had split in two. I thought I would die. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand the sight of it, but I knew it was my own fault, in the end. No amount of apologies can take what I’ve done back.”

Yuuki couldn’t look at him anymore, but there was nowhere else to look except at the paintings, though—Yuuki and Akira, married, their rings on their fingers even if they were dimensions apart. How closely had Yusuke studied him, to properly portray that look on his face? How long had Yusuke been paying attention to how Yuuki looked at Akira? How had Yuuki never caught him at it?

And why? Why had Yusuke been looking at all? What, exactly, was so great about watching him?

“I don’t understand, Yusuke,” he said.

“That’s alright,” Yusuke said. “It’s—it’s not a terribly long story. I can explain further, if you’d like.”

“I do.” If there was one thing he was sure of, it was that he wanted to know why. Everything had spiraled out from Yusuke’s decision, after all, and they wouldn’t be sitting here worried that their friendship was going to break into pieces otherwise.

“Alright,” Yusuke said, and turned from the window again. This time he settled into the only other chair and made himself comfortable. When he looked at the group of them, there was something steely and determined in his eyes, as if he knew already what the outcome of his story would be and was ready to face the consequences.

“I’m afraid it’s also a rather boring story, you see,” Yusuke said. “But the most important fact is that it begins with love…”

* * *

“Akira. We need to get ready.”

Akira sighed. For a second the hand in his had felt human and warm, and now it was cold and lifeless and mechanical. “How much longer do you think we have?”

“I don’t know,” Goro said. “Can we—can we even survive out there, if the ship begins to fail?”

What if we came all this way only to die?

“We’ll have to,” Akira said. “I’ll help you into your suit, don’t worry.”

Goro, with his Sharl body like Ren’s, would probably be fine if he were sucked into the vacuum of space—but Akira wouldn’t. He was flesh and blood. His muscles still ached from the long, long time they’d spent in cryostasis, and it felt as if he was thinking through a cloud of fog.

He’d hoped the chess game would wake him up before they faced God, but…

 _No buts_ , he thought. No buts. Not with Goro’s life on the line. Not with this. Not when he had to do one last task, make one last stand, before he could go home and sink into Yuuki’s arms.

The suit was almost comically large on Goro—there hadn’t been any in a child’s size in storage, and neither of them knew how to make one, and he screwed the helmet in place as the lights overhead flickered. Goro wound up helping him put his suit on, and every time the lights flickered they could hear the ship’s great engine begin to die. Life support was going to fail.

Goro was crying as Akira’s helmet slid shut. Akira couldn’t hold him close, but he did take his hands and squeezed with all his might.

“It’ll be okay, Goro,” he said.

Goro grunted. Snot dripped down his nose. He whined that it itched—

The lights died. The great engine powering the Soreil gave one last thrum of energy under their boots before it, too, died and went silent.

Space was so quiet. The ship didn’t even groan.

Akira pressed the button on Goro’s suit that activated the meager life support system, then his own—except they didn’t work. They didn’t need to, here at the center of the universe.

Here, where God Sang.

Goro ripped his helmet off, scrubbing at his face, making noise just for the sake of it. A new thrumming started up under their feet, something softer and gentler. The ship broke apart all around them, the walls and wires and tubes rejoining what made them. The suits vanished in a shower of sparks that left them bare; they ate everything, down to the tie Goro had used to pull his hair back and the little rings Akira had carved for himself back on the reborn Ra Ciela.

They ate everything—

Except Akira. Except Goro.

Except God.

Goro took his hand and squeezed. Akira squeezed back. God enveloped them both, shapeless and formless except as a cluster of galaxies that seemed farther out of reach than the Soreil had sailed.

“EXA_PICO,” Akira said.

“God,” Goro said.

There was a distant whispering in his mind, a chatter as it looked through his head—

“Stop that,” he said, but space was already transforming around him—there were boards beneath his feet, and the familiar dining table he’d spent so many nights at, and—

And his parents, sitting there, waiting for him.

“Mama,” Goro said, taking a step forward.

Akira’s mother shifted, like an image on an old CRT, flickering between black hair and brown, brown-red eyes and gray, a mole on her cheek where there hadn’t been one before. She smiled. She said, in three different voices blended together, “No, dear. But I can be, if you’d like.”

“It’s easier if we talk this way, isn’t it?” Akira’s father said, in the same voice. “Your mind can’t comprehend what I say, otherwise. Much easier this way. Human minds are so strange.”

“You’re not Mama,” Goro accused, as if God hadn’t already answered that question.

“I’m not,” she—it? They? They—said, again, as if they hadn’t already answered that question. “But I would like to be. I’ve loved you for such a long time, now. It would make me so happy if you loved me back.”

“That was _love_?” Akira shot.

“You exist, don’t you? Isn’t that proof enough of my love for you?”

“Don’t start getting philosophical on an eight-year-old when you look like his mother. And don’t you _dare_ try to say you love us just because we exist.”

God laughed. Still gentle, still loving, they said, “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? But that doesn’t change that I love you—I give each and every thing here, alive or not, an equal amount of my love. The things you create, the lives you live, even what you ruin—I love them all.”

As his father, they said, “Down to the tiniest speck of dirt on the most distant star—that’s how much I love.”

“That doesn’t sound like very much at all,” Akira said.

“But it is!” they argued. “I love you all. I love you all so much—and when you die, you return to me, where I can hold you in my arms again until you’re ready to leave once more. Sometimes it’s eons before you leave again. Sometimes it’s mere seconds. But I cherish every moment you’re here, and every moment you’re not. You feel it now, don’t you?”

He did: love, down to the marrow in his bones; love, swimming in his veins; love, firing in the spaces between his cells. He could think, but compared to the love that vibrated through his whole body, those thoughts were nothing.

He was loved. What did anything else matter?

“Dear,” said God, coming through the table to hold his face in their hands, the touch of their fingers like the burning of suns and stars, the fierceness of their gaze like the reaches of the most distant black holes. It sucked him in. His breath caught in his throat.

He was loved. Why was he here, if he was loved?

“My poor child,” said God. “I’m here now. I love you. I’ve always loved you. Even when you didn’t love me back, I loved you. Even now that you’re here, face to face with me, and still yearning to return home—I still love you. I will always love you.”

“But—” Goro said, tears fresh on his cheeks, as Akira forced himself to look anywhere but the face of God—and then back again, because if God was so petty as to use their influence on him, he was going to fight them on his terms and _win_ , damn it, “—but you’re not Mama! Everyone said I could go back to Mama if I came here! I slept forever in some gross bed to get here! I want to go _home_!”

God actually looked disappointed. Akira wasn’t sure what to make of that. He said, “The love we want is different from yours. You—you sat back and watched everything that happened to us and didn’t do a thing in the name of equality. You—you let it happen. You let them call us here. If you cared one bit as much as you say you do, you wouldn’t have.”

“But I do care,” they said. “I love you very much.”

“As much as _dirt_!” Goro fired back.

“And I love that dirt very much,” God said, their voice shifting and changing and trying again. Akira knew the voice they were trying this time; he’d just heard him crying on the other side of a screen, after all. “I don’t know what it will take to help you understand. My love is infinite. It encompasses all. I can love you as much as I love a speck of dirt or a drop of water; I can love you as much as I love the ship you rode here on or a planet as large as the horizon. I _do_ love you that much.”

“Well I don’t!” Goro said, stomping his foot. “I miss my Mama! I miss her hugs and her pancakes and her funny shampoo and her dumb t-shirts! I miss the way she’d scold me if I was bad and praise me if I was good! I miss the way she’d sing me lullabies when I had a nightmare! I miss the way she’d tell me not to mind the kids at school for making fun of me! I miss _her_ , not _you_!”

God turned that disappointed look on Akira. He shook his head. “It’s different. You’re—you’re a god. You can’t hold us when we’re scared or lonely. You can’t laugh at the dumb things we say. You—we didn’t even know you existed until just now. Whatever your love is, it’s not the kind we want. We don’t question whether our parents love us, we know it because they show us. Continued existence might be good for these guys, but we want other displays of love.”

“Others?” God asked, and they searched through his mind, every nook and cranny. He knew what they would find there: that desire for acceptance and praise and understanding; the need to be held and touched and excited; the want to know another person as deeply or deeper than Akira knew himself.

God lifted their hands, trying to embrace him—Akira took a step back. “Don’t,” he said. “Anything from you now is meaningless. You can’t understand what we mean. Just send us home. It’s all we want, after all of this.”

“You want to leave me?” God asked.

“We want to go where the ones we love return our love in ways that we understand,” Akira said. “Your love—we can’t understand that anymore than you can understand why we don’t want it, and—they miss us. Our families, our friends.” _My boyfriend_ , he didn’t say, but it was there on the tip of his tongue. “They want us to go home. If you love us so much, would you really take us away from them? What if our God misses us the same way you will?”

“You truly don’t wish to stay?” God asked. “If you leave, and find that everything is worse than before, I won’t be there to love you, then.”

“Nothing could be worse than before,” Akira said.

Nothing could be worse than being seen as an oddity by his own classmates. Nothing could be worse than being arrested and falsely charged with a record that would never go away. Nothing could be worse than losing his home, his family.

And Goro—Akira couldn’t imagine the pain the child of a single mother went through. Bullies, he imagined. Being left out of birthday invites. Never having the chance to go anywhere because money was tight and his mom was never home—and when she was, she was too tired to do much more than sleep, but being loved regardless of all of that and how hard life was.

At his side, Goro nodded. “Mama misses me,” he declared. “I know she does. I miss her, too.”

“I see,” God said, in that flickering tone. It took on four voices: Akira’s parents, Goro’s mom, Yuuki.

“I see,” God said again. “I love you. And because I love you, I will help you return home. But you must help me, too. There are so many worlds—so many possibilities—so many lives you could have lived there. You will help me find which one is yours, that you belong to.”

“Really?” Goro asked.

“Yes,” God said.

“Then I want to! Anything we have to do, I can do it!”

Akira would have laughed at his eagerness if it hadn’t been the same eagerness that had nearly killed them all—and Akira—multiple times. “What would we have to do?” he asked.

“You already possess several connections I could make use of,” God said. “You journeyed for a long time with one, didn’t you? Once I’ve established a connection through that, it will only be a matter of searching to find your correct time.”

“Are even the dead connections of use to you?”

“Dead, alive,” God said, with that soft smile that his mother never used anymore, “it is all the same, in the end. A connection. A piece of you lies with them, however dormant. But you must connect with me before I can make use of them. All I would need from you is a Song.”

“Any Song?” Akira asked.

“Anything at all. It will come from your soul if you let it.”

From his soul. And the connections that had been bogging down his mind for so long—the people that had come and gone or never come at all, or the ones who had stayed like Yuuki and the one who loved him.

What kind of Song could his soul Sing, with a heart as heavy as his own?

“There’s one thing I’d like to check before we do,” he said, and when God nodded, he turned to Goro. “Do you remember the spell I taught you, Goro?”

“Yeah,” Goro said, and rattled off a set of familiar numbers.

“If you remember when we go back, whenever you’re in trouble or need me, use them. We’re friends now. We’ve seen too much of each other to be anything but. Can you do that?”

“What if you don’t remember?”

“I’ll still be your friend. I was a lonely kid, too, you know, and there was nothing I wanted more than a friend. Promise me you will.”

Goro was so small, but his face was so determined. He repeated the numbers under his breath, searching Akira for any hint of a lie.

It was a waste of time. They both knew it was true. This was the boy who had ripped his whole mind apart, tearing memory from memory, sundering everything held within. He had to have gleaned that Akira wasn’t popular with his classmates, was barely liked—was, at best, tolerated. They were the same in that regard.

Finally Goro said, “We don’t have to be lonely if we’re together.”

“That’s right,” Akira said.

He stood. They turned back to God, whose form wavered; the background they had conjured flickered until Akira closed his eyes. All that was left was darkness and the light of love and the faint tingle of God’s passing through his very soul; words bubbled to life on his lips. Goro’s hand squeezed his.

And all that was left of them was love and a Song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's that. Thanks for taking the time to read this behemoth of a story, and watch out for bexm sometime around December!


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